n route they would be competent to minister to
themselves and to one another. Under the grading system employed by the
chief surgeons a man, who was still all in one piece and who probably
would not break apart in transit, was designated as being lightly
wounded. This statement is no attempt upon my part to indulge in levity
concerning the most frightful situation I have encountered in nearly
twenty years of active newspaper work; it is the sober, unexaggerated
truth.

And so these lightly wounded men--men with their jaws shot away, men
with holes in their breasts and their abdomens, men with their spine
tips splintered, men with their arms and legs broken, men with their
hands and feet shredded by shrapnel, men with their scalps ripped open,
men with their noses and their ears and their fingers and toes gone, men
jarred to the very marrow of their bones by explosives--these men, for
whom ordinarily soft beds would have been provided and expert care and
special food, came trundling up alongside that noisome station; and,
through the door openings from where they were housed like dumb beasts,
they looked out at us with the glazed eyes of dumb suffering beasts.

As the little toy-like European cars halted, bumping together hard,
orderlies went running down the train bearing buckets of soup, and of
coffee and of drinking water, and loaves of the heavy, dark German
bread. Behind them went other men--bull-necked strong men picked for
this job because of their strength. Their task was to bring back in
their arms or upon their shoulders such men as were past walking. There
were no stretchers. There was no time for stretchers. Behind this train
would be another one just like it and behind that one, another, and so
on down an eighty-mile stretch of dolorous way. And this, mind you, was
but one of three lines carrying out of France and Belgium into Germany
victims of the war to be made well again in order that they might return
and once more be fed as tidbits into the maw of that war; it was but one
of a dozen or more such streams, threading back from as many battle
zones to the countries engaged in this wide and ardent scheme of mutual
extermination.

Half a minute after the train stopped a procession was moving toward us,
made up of men who had wriggled down or who had been eased down out of
the cars, and who were coming to the converted buffet room for help.
Mostly they came afoot, sometimes holding on to one another