that I did not, while I registered a vow to
learn. Then some American Red Cross men appeared, and some English
doctors. Before midnight three or four long Red Cross trains had been
filled with wounded, and sent out. Yet at that hour more than five
hundred wounded men still lay on their stretchers on the grass outside.
And all the while, as I worked, I thought of how, as soon as the moon
came up, we should hear the familiar roar and rattle of the bombs, and
of how the shrapnel and machine gun bullets would rain down on those
upturned faces.

[Sidenote: The hospital floors are crowded.]

But, grace to heaven, the Germans did not come that night! At midnight I
went into Ward 4, where some of the worst wounded had been placed.
Stretchers had been laid on top of the beds and flat on the floor on
both sides of the central aisle, till one could hardly move. Most of the
wounded seemed to sleep. Only here and there one begged for water, and
these men were usually wounded in the abdomen where not even water
could be given. We could moisten their lips and wipe off the hot
feverish faces, and that was all.

[Sidenote: Everything possible has been done.]

By one o'clock it was evident that the most of what could be done had
been done. Another section of our women had arrived with more food, and
I went out to the covered way between the receiving room and the
operating room, to steal a ride home on the driver's seat of some
departing ambulance. An English boy, who had been gassed, asked me
hoarsely if I could get him a blanket, and I did so. Another man was
there, on whose eyelashes and eyebrows something that looked like ice
seemed to hang. I think it was an application to soothe gas-burns.

It was two o'clock before I got to bed at the mess. The English officer
was still occupying my apartment. I might pass off my action in
resigning it to him as philanthropy, but candor compels me to admit that
I was glad of an excuse to stay at the house where there was company in
case of a bombing raid.

[Sidenote: The French bills come in.]

Friday was a long, tense day. The French merchants and all the people
with whom we had dealings, anticipating our withdrawal, swarmed in with
accounts. When the G.A.N. (Grand Armee Nationale) sent in its request
for a check (previously, I had been obliged fairly to windlass their
bill out of them), I knew the French would evacuate. The Commandant sent
for the Directrice, and advised her to follow F