n not so much a sight as a stench. Everything which
makes for human happiness and human usefulness it has destroyed. What
it has bred, along with misery and pain and fatted burying grounds, is a
vast and loathsome stench and a universe of flies.

The smells and the flies; they were here in this railroad station in
sickening profusion.

I call it a railroad station, although it had lost its functions as such
weeks before. The only trains which ran now were run by the Germans for
strictly German purposes, and so the station had become a victualing
point for troops going south to the fighting and a way hospital for sick
and wounded coming back from the fighting. What, in better days than
these, had been the lunch room was a place for the redressing of hurts.
Its high counters, which once held sandwiches and tarts and wine
bottles, were piled with snowdrifts of medicated cotton and rolls of
lint and buckets of antiseptic washes and drug vials. The ticket booth
was an improvised pharmacy. Spare medical supplies filled the room
where formerly fussy customs officers examined the luggage of travelers
coming out of Belgium into France. Just beyond the platform a wooden
booth, with no front to it, had been knocked together out of rough
planking, and relays of cooks, with greasy aprons over their soiled gray
uniforms, made vast caldrons of stews--always stews--and brewed
so-called coffee by the gallon against the coming of those who would need
it. The stuff was sure to be needed, all of it and more too. So they
cooked and cooked unceasingly and never stopped to wipe a pan or clean a
spoon.

At our backs was the waiting room for first-class passengers, but no
passengers of any class came to it any more, and so by common consent it
was a sort of rest room for the Red Cross men, who mostly were Germans,
but with a few captured Frenchmen among them, still wearing their French
uniforms. There were three or four French military surgeons--prisoners,
to be sure, but going and coming pretty much as they pleased. The tacit
arrangement was that the Germans should succor Germans and that the
Frenchmen should minister to their own disabled countrymen among the
prisoners going north, but in a time of stress--and that meant every
time a train came in from the south or west--both nationalities mingled
together and served, without regard for the color of the coat worn by
those whom they served.

Probably from the day it was put up th