ed cloths. The East came riding to the West.
These Mohammedans make a religion of fighting. It has its ritual and
its ceremony--even though shrapnel makes such a nasty mess of
men.

So I stood looking down on these living pictures of a city in the war
zone. But now and again I glanced back into the room behind the
window, and listened to the scraps of talk which came from the
lounge and the scattered chairs. There was a queer collection of
people in this room. They, too, had some kind of business in the job
of war, either to kill or to cure. Among them was a young Belgian
lieutenant who used to make a "bag" of the Germans he killed eaeh
day with his mitrailleuse until the numbers bored him and he lost
count. Near him were three or four nurses discussing wounds and
dying wishes and the tiresome hours of a night when a thousand
wounded streamed in suddenly, just as they were hoping for a quiet
cup of coffee. A young surgeon spoke some words which I heard as I
turned my head from the window.

"It's the frightful senselessness of all this waste of life which makes
one sick with horror..."

Another doctor came in with a tale from Ypres, where he had taken
his ambulances under shell-fire.

"It's monstrous," he said, "all the red tape! Because I belong to a
volunteer ambulance the officers wanted to know by what infernal
impudence I dared to touch the wounded. I had to drive forty miles to
get official permission, and could not get it then... And the wounded
were lying about everywhere, and it was utterly impossible to cope
with the numbers of them... They stand on etiquette when men are
crying out in agony! The Prussian caste isn't worse than that."

I turned and looked out of the window again. But I saw nothing of the
crowd below. I saw only a great tide of blood rising higher and higher,
and I heard, not the squawking of motor-horns, but the moans of men
in innumerable sheds, where they lie on straw waiting for the
surgeon's knife and crying out for morphia. I saw and heard, because
I had seen and heard these things before in France and Belgium.

In the room there was the touch of quiet fingers on a piano not too
bad. It was the music of deep, soft chords. A woman's voice spoke
quickly, excitedly.

"Oh! Some one can play. Ask him to play! It seems a thousand years
since I heard some music. I'm thirsty for it!"

A friend of mine who had struck the chords while standing before the
piano, sat down, and smiled a litt