By bits I learned something about three of the women who served on the so-called day shift, which meant that they worked from early morning until long after midnight.  One was a titled woman who had volunteered for this duty.  She was beyond middle age, plainly in poor health herself and everlastingly on the verge of collapse from weakness and exhaustion.  Her will kept her on her feet.  The second was a professional nurse from one of the university towns—­from Bonn, I think.  She called herself Sister Bartholomew, for the German nurses who go to war take other names than their own, just as nuns do.  She was a beautiful woman, tall and strong and round-faced, with big, fine gray eyes.  Her energy had no limits.  She ran rather than walked.  She had a smile for every maimed man who was brought to her, but when the man had been treated, and had limped away or had been carried away, I saw her often wringing her hands and sobbing over the utter horror of it all.  Then another sufferer would appear and she would wipe the tears off her cheeks and get to work again.  The third—­so an assistant surgeon confided to us—­was the mistress of an officer at the front, a prostitute of the Berlin sidewalks, who enrolled for hospital work when her lover went to the front.  She Was a tall, dark, handsome girl, who looked to be more Spaniard than German, and she was graceful and lithe even in the exceedingly shapeless costume of blue print that she wore.  She was less deft than either of her associates but very willing and eager.  As between the three—­the noblewoman, the working woman and the woman of the street—­the medical officials in charge made no distinction whatsoever.  Why should they?  In this sisterhood of mercy they all three stood upon the same common ground.  I never knew that slop jars were noble things until I saw women in these military lazarets bearing them in their arms; then to me they became as altar vessels.

Lacking women to do it, the head surgeon had intrusted the task of clearing away the dirt to certain men.  A sorry job they made of it.  For accumulated nastiness that waiting room was an Augean stable and the two soldiers who dawdled about in it with brooms lacked woefully in the qualities of Hercules.  Putting a broom in a man’s hands is the best argument in favor of woman’s suffrage that I know of, anyhow.  A third man who helped at chores in the transformed lunch room had gathered up and piled together in a heap upon the ground near us a bushel or so of used bandages—­grim reminders left behind after the last train went by—­ and he had touched a match to the heap in an effort to get rid of it by fire.  By reason of what was upon them the clothes burned slowly, sending up a smudge of acrid smoke to mingle with smells of carbolic acid and iodoform, and the scent of boiling food, and of things infinitely less pleasant than these.