Those sounds
spoiled the music of the lapping water and the whispering of the willows
and the song of birds. The sight of these tortured boys, made useless
in life, took the color out of the flowers and the beauty out of that
vision of the great cathedral, splendid above the river. Women watched
them from the bridge, straining their eyes as the bodies were carried
to the bank. I think some of them looked for their own men. One of them
spoke to me one day.

"That is what the Germans do to our sons. Bandits! Assassins!"

"Yes. That is war, Madame."

She put a skinny hand on my arm.

"Will it go on forever, this war? Until all the men are killed?"

"Not so long as that, Madame. Some men will be left alive. The very old
and the very young, and the lucky ones, and those behind the lines."

"The Germans are losing many men, Monsieur?"

"Heaps, Madame. I have seen their bodies strewn about the fields."

"Ah, that is good! I hope all German women will lose their sons, as I
have lost mine."

"Where was that, Madame?"

"Over there."

She pointed up the Somme.

"He was a good son. A fine boy. It seems only yesterday he lay at my
breast. My man weeps for him. They were good comrades."

"It is sad, Madame."

"Ah, but yes. It is sad! Au revoir, Monsieur."

"Au revoir, Madame."

XV

There was a big hospital in Amiens, close to the railway station,
organized by New Zealand doctors and nurses. I went there one day in the
autumn of 1914, when the army of von Kluck had passed through the city
and gone beyond. The German doctors had left behind the instruments
abandoned by an English unit sharing the retreat. The French doctor who
took me round told me the enemy had behaved well in Amiens. At least he
had refrained from atrocities. As I went through the long wards I did
not guess that one day I should be a patient there. That was two years
later, at the end of the Somme battles. I was worn out and bloodless
after five months of hard strain and nervous wear and tear. Some bug had
bitten me up in the fields where lay the unburied dead.

"Trench fever," said the doctor.

"You look in need of a rest," said the matron. "My word, how white you
are! Had a hard time, eh, like the rest of them?"

I lay in bed at the end of the officers' ward, with only one other bed
between me and the wall. That was occupied by the gunner-general of the
New Zealand Division. Opposite was another row of beds in which officers
lay