its weight on to the stretcher. Yes, some of the shell
wounds were rather big. One could hardly sew a man together again
with bits of cotton... It was only afterwards, when I had helped to put
the stretcher in a separate room on the other side of the courtyard,
that a curious trembling took possession of me for a moment... The
horror of it all! Were the virtues which were supposed to come from
war, "the binding strength of nations," "the cleansing of corruption,"
all the falsities of men who make excuses for this monstrous crime,
worth the price that was being paid in pain and tears and death? It is
only the people who sit at home who write these things. When one is
in the midst of war false heroics are blown out of one's soul by all its
din and tumult of human agony. One learns that courage itself exists,
in most cases, as the pride in the heart of men very much afraid--a
pride which makes them hide their fear. They do not become more
virtuous in war, but only reveal the virtue that is in them. The most
heroic courage which came into the courtyard at Furnes was not that
of the stretcher-bearers who went out under fire, but that of the
doctors and nurses who tended the wounded, toiling ceaselessly in
the muck of blood, amidst all those sights and sounds. My spirit
bowed before them as I watched them at work. I was proud if I could
carry soup to any of them when they came into the refectory for a
hurried meal, or if I could wash a plate clean so that they might fill it
with a piece of meat from the kitchen stew. I would have cleaned their
boots for them if it had been worth while cleaning boots to tramp the
filthy yard.

"It's not surgery!" said one of the young surgeons, coming out of the
operating-theatre and washing his hands at the kitchen sink; "it's
butchery!"

He told me that he had never seen such wounds or imagined them,
and as for the conditions in which he worked--he raised his hands
and laughed at the awfulness of them, because it is best to laugh
when there is no remedy. There was a scarcity of dressings, of
instruments, of sterilizers. The place was so crowded that there was
hardly room to turn, and wounded men poured in so fast that it was
nothing but hacking and sewing.

"I'm used to blood," said the young surgeon. "It's some years now
since I was put through my first ordeal, of dissecting dead bodies and
then handling living tissue. You know how it's done--by gradual
stages until a student no longer