lly appeared.

There are some days when it is very bad in a field hospital, just as
there are some days when there is nothing to do, and the whole staff is
practically idle. The bad days are those when the endless roar of the
guns makes the little wooden _baracques_ rock and rattle, and when
endless processions of ambulances drive in and deliver broken, ruined
men, and then drive off again, to return loaded with more wrecks. The
beds in the _Salle d'Attente_, where the ambulances unload, are filled
with heaps under blankets. Coarse, hobnailed boots stick out from the
blankets, and sometimes the heaps, which are men, moan or are silent. On
the floor lie piles of clothing, filthy, muddy, blood-soaked, torn or
cut from the silent bodies on the beds. The stretcher bearers step over
these piles of dirty clothing, or kick them aside, as they lift the
shrinking bodies to the brown stretchers, and carry them across, one
by one, to the operating room. The operating room is filled with
stretchers, lying in rows upon the floor, waiting their turn to be
emptied, to have their burdens lifted from them to the high operating
tables. And as fast as the stretchers are emptied, the stretcher-bearers
hurry back to the _Salle d'Attente_, where the ambulances dump their
loads, and come over to the operating room again, with fresh lots. Three
tables going in the operating room, and the white-gowned surgeons stand
so thick around the tables that you cannot see what is on them. There
are stretchers lying on the floor of the corridor, and against the walls
of the operating room, and more ambulances are driving in all the time.

From the operating room they are brought into the wards, these bandaged
heaps from the operating tables, these heaps that once were men. The
clean beds of the ward are turned back to receive them, to receive the
motionless, bandaged heaps that are lifted, shoved, or rolled from the
stretchers to the beds. Again and again, all day long, the procession of
stretchers comes into the wards. The foremost bearer kicks open the door
with his knee, and lets in ahead of him a blast of winter rain, which
sets dancing the charts and papers lying on the table, and blows out the
alcohol lamp over which the syringe is boiling. Someone bangs the door
shut. The unconscious form is loaded on the bed. He is heavy and the bed
sags beneath his weight. The _brancardiers_ gather up their red blankets
and shuffle off again, leaving cakes of mud