y Scotland,
with a wound that would take some time to heal.

There were other wounded men from whom no laughter came, nor any sound.
They were carried to the train on stretchers, laid down awhile on the
wooden platforms, covered with blankets up to their chins--unless they
uncovered themselves with convulsive movements. I saw one young Londoner
so smashed about the face that only his eyes were uncovered between
layers of bandages, and they were glazed with the first film of death.
Another had his jaw blown clean away, so the doctor told me, and the
upper half of his face was livid and discolored by explosive gases. A
splendid boy of the Black Watch was but a living trunk. Both his arms
and both his legs were shattered. If he lived after butcher's work of
surgery he would be one of those who go about in boxes on wheels, from
whom men turn their eyes away, sick with a sense of horror. There were
blind boys led to the train by wounded comrades, groping, very quiet,
thinking of a life of darkness ahead of them--forever in the darkness
which shut in their souls. For days and weeks that followed there was
always a procession of ambulances on the way to the dirty little town of
Lillers, and going along the roads I used to look back at them and see
the soles of muddy boots upturned below brown blankets. It was more
human wreckage coming down from the salient of Loos, from the chalkpits
of Hulluch and the tumbled earth of the Hohenzollern redoubt, which had
been partly gained by the battle which did not succeed. Outside a square
brick building, which was the Town Hall of Lillers, and for a time
a casualty clearing-station, the "bad" cases were unloaded; men with
chunks of steel in their lungs and bowels were vomiting great gobs of
blood, men with arms and legs torn from their trunks, men without noses,
and their brains throbbing through opened scalps, men without faces...

XI

To a field behind the railway station near the grimy village of Choques,
on the edge of this Black Country of France, the prisoners were brought;
and I went among them and talked with some of them, on a Sunday morning,
when now the rain had stopped and there was a blue sky overhead and good
visibility for German guns and ours.

There were fourteen hundred German prisoners awaiting entrainment,
a mass of slate-gray men lying on the wet earth in huddled heaps of
misery, while a few of our fresh-faced Tommies stood among them with
fixed bayonets.