the way was beyond
understanding. With shattered limbs and mangled flesh they came, worn,
hungry, thirsty, in agony, some stumbling alone, some helped along by
less grievously injured comrades. In a pitiful throng they gathered
around the dressing station.

'The quick eyes of the R.A.M.C. sergeant picked out the worst cases, and
these were hurried into the hut where the medical officers plied their
sorrowful trade. The others sat down and waited their turn with the
stolid patience of the British soldier when he is wounded, and among
them worked an Angel of Mercy, an elderly angel clad in a flannel
shirt, and a pair of mud-stained khaki trousers. Amid the poor jetsam of
the fight went the Y.M.C.A. man with his mugs of cocoa and his biscuits,
his chocolate and his cigarettes, as much a minister of healing as was
the surgeon with his dressings and anodynes. All the men were bitterly
cold after their long night of waiting in the old front trench, or were
dead beat with the nervous strain of the action and the pain of their
wounds. All were hungry. A few no longer cared greatly what more might
happen to them, for they had reached the limit of endurance, as surely
as they had reached the limit of suffering. But even to those last the
warm drink and the food and, perhaps more than anything else, the
soothing nicotine, brought back life and hope in place of apathy and
despair. 'God bless you, sir,' murmured a man here and there. But the
greater part could find no words to speak the gratitude which their
eyes told forth so clearly.'

This little story is not the tale of one actual incident. It is only the
stereotype of scenes that have been acted and reacted often and often at
the Front. Time and time again has the Red Triangle come to the aid of
the Red Cross, placing its workers and its stores unreservedly at the
disposal of the Royal Army Medical Corps. When the wounded have been
pouring into the dressing stations in hundreds, the Y.M.C.A. workers
have taken over the responsibility of feeding them, and have halved the
cares of the overwrought R.A.M.C. This they have done not once but
unnumbered times, and what gratitude they have earned from their guests!
The wounded man can scarcely realise what he owes to the surgeon who
tends his injuries; but he does appreciate his debt to the man who feeds
him and gives him the 'fag' for which he has been craving. The cocoa
and cigarettes of the Y.M.C.A. do not figure among the medicam