for mutual
support. Perhaps one in five was borne bodily by an orderly. He might
be hunched in the orderly's arms like a weary child, or he might be
traveling upon the orderly's back, pack-fashion, with his arms gripped
about the bearer's neck; and then, in such a case, the pair of them,
with the white hollow face of the wounded man nodding above the sweated
red face of the other, became a monstrosity with two heads and one pair
of legs.

Here, advancing toward us with the gait of a doddering grandsire, would
be a boy in his teens, bent double and clutching his middle with both
hands. Here would be a man whose hand had been smashed, and from beyond
the rude swathings of cotton his fingers protruded stiffly and were so
congested and swollen they looked like fat red plantains. Here was a
man whose feet were damaged. He had a crutch made of a spade handle.
Next would be a man with a hole in his neck, and the bandages had pulled
away from about his throat, showing the raw inflamed hole. In this
parade I saw a French infantryman aided along by a captured Zouave on
one side and on the other by a German sentry who swung his loaded
carbine in his free hand. Behind them I saw an awful nightmare of a
man--a man whose face and bare cropped head and hands and shoes were
all of a livid, poisonous, green cast. A shell of some new and
particularly devilish variety had burst near him and the fumes which it
generated in bursting had dyed him green. Every man would have, tied
about his neck or to one of his buttonholes, the German field-doctor's
card telling of the nature of his hurt and the place where he had
sustained it; and the uniform of nearly every one would be discolored
with dried blood, and where the coat gaped open you marked that the
harsh, white cambric lining was made harsher still by stiff, brownish-
red streakings.

In at the door of the improvised hospital filed the parade, and the
wounded men dropped on the floor or else were lowered upon chairs and
tables and cots--anywhere that there was space for them to huddle up or
stretch out. And then the overworked surgeons, French and German, and
the German nursing sisters and certain of the orderlies would fall to.
There was no time for the finer, daintier proceedings that might have
spared the sufferers some measure of their agony. It was cut away the
old bandage, pull off the filthy cotton, dab with antiseptics what was
beneath, pour iodine or diluted acid upon t