“When I entered Dixmude one night in the middle of October the first bombardment was over, but from both sides the heavy shells flew across the town.  From the end of the main street came an incessant noise of rifles and machine guns.  Unaimed bullets wailed through the air, and pattered as they struck the walls.  Flaming houses shed a light upon the ruined streets, but only one house looked inhabited, and all the others which were not burning stood silent and empty, expecting destruction.

“That one house was used as an outlying hospital or dressing-place nearest the firing line, and the wounded had to be led or carried only two or three hundred yards to reach it.  They sat on the dining-room chairs or lay helpless on the floor.  A few surgeons were at work upon them, cutting off loose fingers and throwing them into basins, plugging black holes that welled up instantly through the plug, straining bandages, which in a minute ceased to be white, round legs and heads.  The smell of fresh, warm blood was thick on the air.  One man lay deep in his blood.  You could not have supposed that anyone had so much in him.  Another’s head had lost on one side all human semblance, and was a hideous pulp of eye and ear and jaw.  Another, with chest torn open, lay gasping for the few minutes left of life.  And as I waited for the ambulance more were brought in, and always more.

“In a complacent and comfortable account of hospital work I lately read that ’deaths from wounds are happily rare; one surgeon put the number as low as 2 per cent.’  Happy hospital, far away in Paris or some Isle of the Blest!  The further from the front the fewer the deaths, because so many have died already.

“In the nearest hospitals to the front, half the wounded, and on some days more than half, die where they are put.  Often they die in the ambulance, and one’s care in drawing them out is wasted, for they will never feel again.  I found one always took the same care, though the greenish-yellow of the exposed hands or feet showed the truth.  Laid on the floor of the main hospital itself, some screamed or moaned, some whimpered like sick children, especially in their sleep, some lay quiet, with glazed eyes out of which sight was passing.  Mere fragments of mankind were there extended, limbs pounded into mash, heads split open, intestines hanging out from gashes.  Did those bones—­did that exquisite network of living tissue and contrivances for life—­cost no more in the breeding than to be hewed and smashed and pulped like this?  Shrapnel—­shrapnel—­it was nearly always the same.  For this is, above all, an artillery war, and both sides are justly proud of their efficiency in guns.”

GOVERNMENT RETURNS TO PARIS

Confidence of safety having been restored in the French capital, the Paris bourse reopened on December 7, after having been closed since September 3.  President Poincare transferred his official residence back to Paris from Bordeaux on December 9 and a meeting of the French cabinet was held in Paris on December 11, for the first time since the capital was threatened by the German advance at the end of August.