one's sanity and self-respect. Yet to me, more sensitive perhaps than
it is good to be, it was a moral test almost greater than my strength of
will to enter that large room where the wounded lay, and to approach
a dead man through a lane of dying. (So many of them died after a
night in our guest-house. Not all the skill of surgeons could patch up
some of those bodies, torn open with ghastly wounds from German
shells.) The smell of wet and muddy clothes, coagulated blood and
gangrened limbs, of iodine and chloroform, sickness and sweat of
agony, made a stench which struck one's senses with a foul blow. I
used to try and close my nostrils to it, holding my breath lest I should
vomit. I used to try to keep my eyes upon the ground, to avoid the
sight of those smashed faces, and blinded eyes, and tattered bodies,
lying each side of me in the hospital cots, or in the stretchers set upon
the floor between them. I tried to shut my eyes to the sounds in this
room, the hideous snuffle of men drawing their last breaths, the long-
drawn moans of men in devilish pain, the ravings of fever-stricken
men crying like little children--"Maman! O Maman!"--or repeating over
and over again some angry protest against a distant comrade.

But sights and sounds and smells forced themselves upon one's
senses. I had to look and to listen and to breathe in the odour of
death and corruption. For hours afterwards I would be haunted with
the death face of some young man, lying half-naked on his bed while
nurses dressed his horrible wounds. What waste of men! What
disfigurement of the beauty that belongs to youth! Bearded soldier
faces lay here in a tranquillity that told of coming death. They had
been such strong and sturdy men, tilling their Flemish fields, and
living with a quiet faith in their hearts. Now they were dying before
their time, conscious, some of them, that death was near, so that
weak tears dropped upon their beards, and in their eyes was a great
fear and anguish.

"Je ne veux pas mourir!" said one of them. "O ma pauvre femme! Je
ne veux pas mourir!"

He did not wish to die... but in the morning he was dead.

The corpse that I had to carry out lay pinned up in a sheet. The work
had been very neatly done by the nurse. She whispered to me as I
stood on one side of the bed, with a friend on the other side.

"Be careful. ... He might fall in half."

I thought over these words as I put my hands under the warm body
and helped to lift