a few precious minutes of rest before the next creaking
caravan of misery arrived. There was no need to tell them of its
coming; they knew. All through that afternoon and night, and through
the next day and night, and through the half of the third day that we
stayed on in Maubeuge, the trains came back. They came ten minutes
apart, twenty minutes apart, an hour apart, but rarely more than an hour
would elapse between trains. And this traffic in marred and mutilated
humanity had been going on for four weeks and would go on for nobody
knew how many weeks more.

When the train had gone out of sight beyond the first turn to the
eastward I spoke to the head surgeon of the German contingent--a broad,
bearded, middle-aged man who sat on a baggage truck while an orderly
poured a mixture of water and antiseptics over his soiled hands.

"A lot of those poor devils will die?" I suggested.

"Less than three per cent of those who get back to the base hospitals
will die," he said with a snap of his jaw, as though challenging me to
doubt the statement. "That is the wonder of this war--that so many are
killed in the fighting and that so few die who get back out of it alive.
These modern scientific bullets, these civilized bullets"--he laughed in
self-derision at the use of the word--"they are cruel and yet they are
merciful too. If they do not kill you outright they have a little way,
somehow, of not killing you at all."

"But the bayonet wounds and the saber wounds?" I said. "How about
them?"

"I have been here since the very first," he said; "since the day after
our troops took this town, and God knows how many thousands of wounded
men--Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Turcos, some Belgians--have passed
through my hands; but as yet I have to see a man who has been wounded by
a saber or a lance. I saw one bayonet wound yesterday or the day
before. The man had fallen on his own bayonet and driven it into his
side. Shrapnel wounds? Yes. Wounds from fragments of bombs? Again,
yes. Bullet wounds? I can't tell you how many of those I have seen, but
surely many thousands. But no bayonet wounds. This is a war of hot
lead, not of cold steel. I read of these bayonet charges, but I do not
believe that many such stories are true."

I didn't believe it either.

The train which followed after the first, coming up out of France,
furnished for us much the same sights the first one had furnished, and
so, with some slight variati