ion
whatsoever. Why should they? In this sisterhood of mercy they all three
stood upon the same common ground. I never knew that slop jars were
noble things until I saw women in these military lazarets bearing them
in their arms; then to me they became as altar vessels.

Lacking women to do it, the head surgeon had intrusted the task of
clearing away the dirt to certain men. A sorry job they made of it.
For accumulated nastiness that waiting room was an Augean stable and the
two soldiers who dawdled about in it with brooms lacked woefully in the
qualities of Hercules. Putting a broom in a man's hands is the best
argument in favor of woman's suffrage that I know of, anyhow. A third
man who helped at chores in the transformed lunch room had gathered up
and piled together in a heap upon the ground near us a bushel or so of
used bandages--grim reminders left behind after the last train went by--
and he had touched a match to the heap in an effort to get rid of it by
fire. By reason of what was upon them the clothes burned slowly,
sending up a smudge of acrid smoke to mingle with smells of carbolic
acid and iodoform, and the scent of boiling food, and of things
infinitely less pleasant than these.

Presently a train rolled in and we crossed through the building to the
trackside to watch what would follow. Already we had seen a sufficiency
of such trains; we knew before it came what it would be like: In front
the dumpy locomotive, with a soldier engineer in the cab; then two or
three box cars of prisoners, with the doors locked and armed guards
riding upon the roofs; then two or three shabby, misused passenger
coaches, containing injured officers and sometimes injured common
soldiers, too; and then, stretching off down the rails, a long string of
box cars, each of which would be bedded with straw and would contain for
furniture a few rough wooden benches ranging from side to side. And
each car would contain ten or fifteen or twenty, or even a greater
number, of sick and crippled men.

Those who could sit were upon the hard benches, elbow to elbow, packed
snugly in. Those who were too weak to sit sprawled upon the straw and
often had barely room in which to turn over, so closely were they
bestowed. It had been days since they had started back from the field
hospitals where they had had their first-aid treatment. They had moved
by sluggish stages with long halts in between. Always the wounded must
wait upon the si