he bare and shrinking
tissues, perhaps do that with the knife or probe which must be done
where incipient mortification had set in, clap on fresh cotton, wind a
strip of cloth over it, pin it in place and send this man away to be
fed--providing he could eat; then turn to the next poor wretch. The
first man was out of that place almost before the last man was in; that
was how fast the work went forward.

One special horror was spared: The patients made no outcry. They
gritted their teeth and writhed where they lay, but none shrieked out.
Indeed, neither here nor at any of the other places where I saw wounded
men did we hear that chorus of moans and shrieks with which fiction
always has invested such scenes. Those newly struck seemed stunned into
silence; those who had had time to recover from the first shock of being
struck appeared buoyed and sustained by a stoic quality which lifted
them, mute and calm, above the call of tortured nerves and torn flesh.
Those who were delirious might call out; those who were conscious locked
their lips and were steadfast. In all our experience I came upon just
two men in their senses who gave way at all. One was a boy of nineteen
or twenty, in a field hospital near Rheims, whose kneecap had been
smashed. He sat up on his bed, rocking his body and whimpering
fretfully like an infant. He had been doing that for days, a nurse told
us, but whether he whimpered because of his suffering or at the thought
of going through life with a stiffened leg she did not know. The other
was here at Maubeuge. I helped hold his right arm steady while a
surgeon took the bandages off his hand. When the wrapping came away a
shattered finger came with it--it had rotted off, if you care to know
that detail--and at the sight the victim uttered growling, rasping,
animal-like sounds. Even so, I think it was the thing he saw more than
the pain of it that overcame him; the pain he could have borne. He had
been bearing it for days.

I particularly remember one other man who was brought in off this first
train. He was a young giant. For certain the old father of Frederick
the Great would have had him in his regiment of Grenadier Guards. Well,
for that matter, he was a grenadier in the employ of the same family
now. He hobbled in under his own motive power and leaned against the
wall until the first flurry was over. Then, at a nod from one of the
shirt-sleeved surgeons, he stretched himself upon a bare