dyed as to his hands with iodine to an extent that made
his fingers look like pieces of well-cured meerschaum.

They were bringing in more men, newly wounded that day, as we came out
of Doctor Schilling's improvised operating room in the little village
schoolhouse, and one of the litter bearers was a smart-faced little
London Cockney, a captured English ambulance-hand, who wore a German
soldier's cap to save him from possible annoyance as he went about his
work. Not very many wounded had arrived since the morning--it was a
dull day for them, the surgeons said--but I took note that, when the Red
Cross men put down a canvas stretcher upon the courtyard flags and
shortly thereafter took it up again, it left a broad red smear where it
rested against the flat stones. Also this stretcher and all the other
stretchers had been so sagged by the weight of bodies that they
threatened to rip from the frames, and so stained by that which had
stained them that the canvas was as stiff as though it had been
varnished and revarnished with many coats of brown shellac. But it
wasn't shellac. There is just one fluid which leaves that brown, hard
coating when it dries upon woven cloth.

As I recall now we had come through the gate of the schoolhouse to where
the automobiles stood when a puff of wind, blowing to us from the left,
which meant from across the battlefront, brought to our noses a certain
smell which we already knew full well.

"You get it, I see," said the German officer who stood alongside me.
"It comes from three miles off, but you can get it five miles distant
when the wind is strong. That"--and he waved his left arm toward it as
though the stench had been a visible thing--"that explains why tobacco
is so scarce with us among the staff back yonder in Laon. All the
tobacco which can be spared is sent to the men in the front trenches.
As long as they smoke and keep on smoking they can stand--that!

"You see," he went on painstakingly, "the situation out there at Cerny
is like this: The French and English, but mainly the English, held the
ground firSt. We drove them back and they lost very heavily. In places
their trenches were actually full of dead and dying men when we took
those trenches.

"You could have buried them merely by filling up the trenches with
earth. And that old beet-sugar factory which you saw this noon when we
were at field headquarters--it was crowded with badly wounded
Englishmen.

"At once th