ons, did the third train and the fourth and
all the rest of them. The station became a sty where before it had been
a kennel; the flies multiplied; the stenches increased in volume and
strength, if such were possible; the windows of the littered waiting
room, with their cracked half panes, were like ribald eyes winking at
the living afflictions which continually trailed past them; the floors
looked as though there had been a snowstorm.

A train came, whose occupants were nearly all wounded by shrapnel.
Wounds of the head, the face and the neck abounded among these men--for
the shells, exploding in the air above where they crouched in their
trenches, had bespattered them with iron pebbles. Each individual
picture of! suffering recurred with such monotonous and regular
frequency that after an hour or so it took something out of the common
run--an especially vivid splash of daubed and crimson horror--to quicken
our imaginations and make us fetch out our note books. I recall a young
lieutenant of Uhlans who had been wounded in the breast by fragments of
a grenade, which likewise had smashed in several of his ribs. He
proudly fingered his newly acquired Iron Cross while the surgeon relaced
his battered torso with strips of gauze. Afterward he asked me for a
cigar, providing I had one to spare, saying he had not tasted tobacco
for a week and was perishing for a smoke. We began to take note then
how the wounded men watched us as we puffed at our cigars, and we
realized they were dumbly envying us each mouthful of smoke. So we sent
our chauffeur to the public market with orders to buy all the cigars he
could find on sale there. He presently returned with the front and rear
seats of the automobile piled high with bundled sheaves of the brown
weed--you can get an astonishingly vast number of those domestic French
cigars for the equivalent of thirty dollars in American money--and we
turned the whole cargo over to the head nurse on condition that, until
the supply was exhausted, she give a cigar to every hurt soldier who
might crave one, regardless of his nationality. She cried as she
thanked us for the small charity.

"We can feed them--yes," she said, "but we have nothing to give them to
smoke, and it is very hard on them."

A little later a train arrived which brought three carloads of French
prisoners and one carload of English. Among the Frenchmen were many
Alpine Rangers, so called--the first men we had seen of th