r warmth, like the rest of us. I suffered from cold wet
feet. I hated it that there was never a moment I could be alone. The
toothbrush was the one article of decency clung to. I seemed never to go
into the back garden to clean my teeth without bringing on shell-fire. I
got a sense of there being a connection between brushing the teeth and
the enemy's guns. You find in roughing it that a coating of dirt seems
to keep out chill. We women suffered, but we knew that the boys in
tennis shoes suffered more in that wet season, and the soldiers without
socks, just the bare feet in boots.

In the late fall, we rooted around in the deserted barns for potatoes.
Once, creeping into a farm, which was islanded by water, "Jane Pervyse,"
our homeless dog, led us up to the wrecked bedroom. A bonnet and best
dress were in the cupboard. A soldier put on the bonnet and grimaced.
Always after that, in passing the house, "Jane Pervyse" trembled and
whined as if it had been her home till the destruction came.

In our house, we cleaned vegetables. There was nothing romantic about
our work in these first days. It was mostly cooking, peeling hundreds of
potatoes, slicing bushels of onions, cutting up chunks of meat, until
our arms were aching. These bits were boiled together in great black
pots. Our job, when it wasn't to cook the stew, was to take buckets of
it to the trenches. Here we ladled it out to each soldier. Always we
went early, while mist still hung over the ground, for we could see the
Germans on clear days. It was an adventure, tramping in the freezing
cold of night to the outposts and in early morning to the trenches, back
to the house to refill the buckets, back to the trenches. The mornings
were bitterly cold. Very early in my career as a nurse, I rid myself of
skirts. Boots, covered with rubber boots to the knees in wet weather, or
bound with puttees in warm; breeches; a leather coat and as many jerseys
as I could walk in--these were my clothes. But, as I slept in them, they
didn't keep me very warm in the early morning.

We had one real luxury in the dressing station--a piano. While we cooked
and scrubbed and pared potatoes, men from the lines played for us.

There were other things, necessities, that we lacked. Water, except for
the stagnant green liquid that lay in the ditches where dead men and
dead horses rotted, we went without--once for as long as three days.
During that time we boiled the ditch water and made tea of i