wants to faint at the sight of raw flesh,
but regards it as so much material for scientific work. But this!"--he
looked towards the room into which the wounded came--"It's getting
on my nerves a little. It's the sense of wanton destruction that makes
one loathe it, the utter senselessness of it all, the waste of such good
stuff. War is a hellish game and I'm so sorry for all the poor Belgians
who are getting it in the neck. They didn't ask for it!"

The wooden gates opened to let in another ambulance full of Belgian
wounded, and the young surgeon nodded to me with a smile.

"Another little lot! I must get back into the slaughterhouse. So long!"

I helped out one of the "sitting-up" cases--a young man with a wound
in his chest, who put his arm about my neck and said, "Merci! Merci!"
with a fine courtesy, until suddenly he went limp, so that I had to hold
him with all my strength, while he vomited blood down my coat. I had
to get help to carry him indoors.

And yet there was laughter in the convent where so many men lay
wounded. It was only by gaiety and the quick capture of any jest that
those doctors and nurses and ambulance girls could keep their
nerves steady. So in the refectory, when they sat down for a meal,
there was an endless fire of raillery, and the blue-eyed boy with the
blond hair used to crow like Peter Pan and speak a wonderful mixture
of French and English, and play the jester gallantly. There would be
processions of plate-bearers to the kitchen next door, where a
splendid Englishwoman--one of those fine square-faced, brown-eyed,
cheerful souls--had been toiling all day in the heat of oven and stoves
to cook enough food for fifty-five hungry people who could not wait for
their meals. There was a scramble between two doctors for the last
potatoes, and a duel between one of them and myself in the slicing
up of roast beef or boiled mutton, and amorous advances to the lady
cook for a tit-bit in the baking-pan. There never was such a kitchen,
and a County Council inspector would have reported on it in lurid
terms. The sink was used as a wash-place by surgeons, chauffeurs,
and stretcher-bearers. Nurses would come through with bloody rags
from the ward, which was only an open door away. Lightly wounded
men, covered with Yser mud, would sit at a side table, eating the
remnants of other people's meals. Above the sizzling of sausages
and the clatter of plates one could hear the moaning of the wounded
and the i