The smells and the flies; they were here in this railroad station in sickening profusion.

I call it a railroad station, although it had lost its functions as such weeks before.  The only trains which ran now were run by the Germans for strictly German purposes, and so the station had become a victualing point for troops going south to the fighting and a way hospital for sick and wounded coming back from the fighting.  What, in better days than these, had been the lunch room was a place for the redressing of hurts.  Its high counters, which once held sandwiches and tarts and wine bottles, were piled with snowdrifts of medicated cotton and rolls of lint and buckets of antiseptic washes and drug vials.  The ticket booth was an improvised pharmacy.  Spare medical supplies filled the room where formerly fussy customs officers examined the luggage of travelers coming out of Belgium into France.  Just beyond the platform a wooden booth, with no front to it, had been knocked together out of rough planking, and relays of cooks, with greasy aprons over their soiled gray uniforms, made vast caldrons of stews—­always stews—­and brewed so-called coffee by the gallon against the coming of those who would need it.  The stuff was sure to be needed, all of it and more too.  So they cooked and cooked unceasingly and never stopped to wipe a pan or clean a spoon.

At our backs was the waiting room for first-class passengers, but no passengers of any class came to it any more, and so by common consent it was a sort of rest room for the Red Cross men, who mostly were Germans, but with a few captured Frenchmen among them, still wearing their French uniforms.  There were three or four French military surgeons—­prisoners, to be sure, but going and coming pretty much as they pleased.  The tacit arrangement was that the Germans should succor Germans and that the Frenchmen should minister to their own disabled countrymen among the prisoners going north, but in a time of stress—­and that meant every time a train came in from the south or west—­both nationalities mingled together and served, without regard for the color of the coat worn by those whom they served.

Probably from the day it was put up this station had never been really and entirely clean.  Judged by American standards Continental railway stations are rarely ever clean, even when conditions are normal.  Now that conditions were anything but normal, this Maubeuge station was incredibly and incurably filthy.  No doubt the German nursing sisters who were brought here tried at first, with their German love for orderliness, to keep the interior reasonably tidy; but they had been swamped by more important tasks.  For two weeks now the wounded had been passing through by the thousands and the tens of thousands daily.  So between trains the women dropped into chairs or down upon cots and took their rest in snatches.  But their fingers didn’t reSt. Always their hands were busy with the making of bandages and the fluffing of lint.