the fortifications. Our
objective was a great freight station which the Government, some months
before, had turned into a receiving-post for the wounded; it lay on the
edge of the yard, some distance in from the street, behind a huddle of
smaller sheds and outbuildings. To our surprise the rue de La Chapelle
was strewn with ambulances rushing from the station, and along two sides
of the great yard, where the merchandise trucks had formerly turned in,
six or seven hundred more ambulances were waiting. We turned out of the
dark, rain-swept city into this hurly-burly of shouts, snorting of
engines, clashing of gears, and whining of brakes, illuminated with a
thousand intermeshing beams of headlights across whose brilliance the
rain fell in sloping, liquid rods. "Quick, a small car this way!" cried
some one in an authoritative tone, and number fifty-three ran up an
inclined plane into the enormous shed which had been reserved for the
loading of the wounded into the ambulances.

We entered a great, high, white-washed, warehouse kind of place, about
four hundred feet long by four hundred feet wide, built of wood
evidently years before. In the middle of this shed was an open space,
and along the walls were rows of ambulances. Brancardiers
(stretcher-bearers; from brancard, a stretcher) were loading wounded
into these cars, and as soon as one car was filled, it would go out of
the hall and another would take its place. There was an infernal din;
the place smelled like a stuffy garage, and was full of blue gasoline
fumes; and across this hurly-burly, which was increasing every minute,
were carried the wounded, often nothing but human bundles of dirty blue
cloth and fouled bandages. Every one of these wounded soldiers was
saturated with mud, a gray-white mud that clung moistly to their
overcoats, or, fully dry, colored every part of the uniform with its
powder. One saw men that appeared to have rolled over and over in a
puddle bath of this whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a sinister
mixture of blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a wounded
soldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our human
relation to ordinary meat. Dirty, exhausted, unshaven, smelling of the
trenches, of his wounds, and of the antiseptics on his wounds, the
soldier comes from the train a sight for which only the great heart of
Francis of Assisi could have adequate pity.

Oiler and I went through an opening in a canvas partitio