t. Even
then, it was a deep purplish black and tasted bitter.

All we could do to help the wounded was to wash off mud and apply the
simplest of first-aids, iodine and bandages. We burned bloody clothing
and scoured mackintoshes and scrubbed floors. The odors were bad, a
mixture of decaying matter and raw flesh and cooking food and
disinfectant.

Pervyse was one more dear little Flemish village, with yawning holes in
the houses, and through the holes you saw into the home, the precious
intimate things which revealed how the household lived--the pump,
muffled for winter, the furniture placed for occupancy, a home lately
inhabited. In the burgomaster's house, there were two old mahogany
frames with rare prints, his store of medicines, the excellent piano
which cheered us, in his attic a skeleton. So you saw him in his home
life as a quiet, scholarly man of taste and education. You entered
another gaping house, with two or three bits of inherited
mahogany--clearly, the heirlooms of an old family. Another house
revealed bran new commonplace trinkets. Always the status of the family
was plain to see--their mental life, their tastes, and ambitions. You
would peek in through a broken front and see a cupboard with crotched
mahogany trimmings, one door splintered, the other perfect. You would
catch a glimpse of a round center table with shapely legs, a sofa drawn
up in front of a fireplace. When we went, Pervyse was still partly
upstanding, but the steady shelling of the winter months slowly
flattened it into a wreck. It is the sense of sight through which war
makes its strongest impression on me.

The year falls into a series of pictures, evenings of song when a boy
soldier would improvise verses to our head nurse; a fight between a
Belgian corporal and an English nurse with seltzer bottles; the night
when our soldiers were short of ammunition and we sat up till dawn
awaiting the attack that might send us running for our lives; the black
nights when some spy back of our lines flashed electric messages to the
enemy and directed their fire on our ammunition wagons.

And deeper than those pictures is the consciousness of how adaptable is
the human spirit. Human nature insists on creating something. Under
hunger and danger, it develops a wealth of resource--in art and music,
and carving, making finger-rings of shrapnel, playing songs of the
Yser. Something artistic and playful comes to the rescue. Instead of war
getting us as