tree limbs.  We judged they would be very glad indeed to crawl into those same shelters when night came, for they had been serving the guns all day and plainly were about as weary as men could be.  To burn powder hour after hour and day after day and week after week at a foe who never sees you and whom you never see; to go at this dreary, heavy trade of war with the sober, uninspired earnestness of convicts building a prison wall about themselves—­the ghastly unreality of the proposition left me mentally numbed.

Howsoever, we arrived not long after that at a field hospital—­namely, Field Hospital Number 36, and here was realism enough to satisfy the lexicographer who first coined the word.  This field hospital was established in eight abandoned houses of the abandoned small French village of Colligis, and all eight houses were crowded with wounded men lying as closely as they could lie upon mattresses placed side by side on the floors, with just room to step between the mattresses.  Be it remembered also that these were all men too seriously wounded to be moved even to a point as close as Laon; those more lightly injured than these were already carried back to the main hospitals.

We went into one room containing only men suffering from chest wounds, who coughed and wheezed and constantly fought off the swarming flies that assailed them, and into another room given over entirely to brutally abbreviated human fragments—­fractional parts of men who had lost their arms or legs.  On the far mattress against the wall lay a little pale German with his legs gone below the knees, who smiled upward at the ceiling and was quite chipper.

“A wonderful man, that little chap,” said one of the surgeons to me.  “When they first brought him here two weeks ago I said to him:  ’It’s hard on you that you should lose both your feet,’ and he looked up at me and grinned and said:  ’Herr Doctor, it might have been worse.  It might have been my hands—­and me a tailor by trade!’”

This surgeon told us he had an American wife, and he asked me to bear a message for him to his wife’s people in the States.  So if these lines should come to the notice of Mrs. Rosamond Harris, who lives at Hinesburg, Vermont, she may know that her son-in-law, Doctor Schilling, was at last accounts very busy and very well, although coated with white dust—­face, head and eyebrows—­so that he reminded me of a clown in a pantomime, and dyed as to his hands with iodine to an extent that made his fingers look like pieces of well-cured meerschaum.

They were bringing in more men, newly wounded that day, as we came out of Doctor Schilling’s improvised operating room in the little village schoolhouse, and one of the litter bearers was a smart-faced little London Cockney, a captured English ambulance-hand, who wore a German soldier’s cap to save him from possible annoyance as he went about his work.  Not very many wounded had arrived since the morning—­it