except the hospitals. Every
schoolhouse was a hospital; indeed I think there can be no schoolhouse
in the zone of actual hostilities that has not served such a purpose.
In their altered aspects we came to know these schoolhouses mighty well.
We would see the wounded going in on stretchers and the dead coming out
in boxes. We would see how the blackboards, still scrawled over perhaps
with the chalked sums of lessons which never were finished, now bore
pasted-on charts dealing in nurses' and surgeons' cipher-manual, with
the bodily plights of the men in the cots and on the mattresses beneath.
We would see classrooms where plaster casts and globe maps and dusty
textbooks had been cast aside in heaps to make room on desktops and
shelves for drugs and bandages and surgical appliances. We would see
the rows of hooks intended originally for the caps and umbrellas of
little people; but now from each hook dangled the ripped, bloodied
garments of a soldier--gray for a German, brown-tan for an Englishman,
blue-and-red for a Frenchman or a Belgian. By the German rule a wounded
man's uniform must be brought back with him from the place where he fell
and kept handily near him, with tags on it, to prove its proper
identity, and there it must stay until its owner needs it again--if ever
he needs it again.

We would see these things, and we would wonder if these schoolhouses
could ever shake off the scents and the stains and the memories of these
present grim visitations--wonder if children would ever frolic any more
in the courtyards where the ambulances stood now with red drops
trickling down from their beds upon the gravel. But that, on our part,
was mere morbidness born of the sights we saw. Children forget even
more quickly than their elders forget, and we knew, from our own
experience, how quickly the populace of a French or Flemish community
could rally back to a colorable counterfeit of their old sprightliness,
once the immediate burdens of affliction and captivity had been lifted
from off them.

From a jumbled confusion of recollection of these schoolhouse-hospitals
sundry incidental pictures stick out in my mind as I write this article.
I can shut my eyes and visualize the German I saw in the little parish
school building in the abandoned hamlet of Colligis near by the River
Aisne. He was in a room with a dozen others, all suffering from chest
wounds. He had been pierced through both lungs with a bullet, and to
keep