Presently a train rolled in and we crossed through the building to the trackside to watch what would follow.  Already we had seen a sufficiency of such trains; we knew before it came what it would be like:  In front the dumpy locomotive, with a soldier engineer in the cab; then two or three box cars of prisoners, with the doors locked and armed guards riding upon the roofs; then two or three shabby, misused passenger coaches, containing injured officers and sometimes injured common soldiers, too; and then, stretching off down the rails, a long string of box cars, each of which would be bedded with straw and would contain for furniture a few rough wooden benches ranging from side to side.  And each car would contain ten or fifteen or twenty, or even a greater number, of sick and crippled men.

Those who could sit were upon the hard benches, elbow to elbow, packed snugly in.  Those who were too weak to sit sprawled upon the straw and often had barely room in which to turn over, so closely were they bestowed.  It had been days since they had started back from the field hospitals where they had had their first-aid treatment.  They had moved by sluggish stages with long halts in between.  Always the wounded must wait upon the sidings while the troop trains from home sped down the cleared main line to the smoking front; that was the merciless but necessary rule.  The man who got himself crippled became an obstacle to further progress, a drag upon the wheels of the machine; whereas the man who was yet whole and fit was the man whom the generals wanted.  So the fresh grist for the mill, the raw material, if you will, was expedited upon its way to the hoppers; that which already had been ground up was relatively of the smallest consequence.

Because of this law, which might not be broken or amended, these wounded men would, perforce, spend several days aboard train before they could expect to reach the base hospitals upon German soil, Maubeuge being at considerably less than midway of the distance between starting point and probable destination.  Altogether the trip might last a week or even two weeks—­a trip that ordinarily would have lasted less than twelve hours.  Through it these men, who were messed and mangled in every imaginable fashion, would wallow in the dirty matted straw, with nothing except that thin layer of covering between them and the car floors that jolted and jerked beneath them.  We knew it and they knew it, and there was nothing to be done.  Their wounds would fester and be hot with fever.  Their clotted bandages would clot still more and grow stiffer and harder with each dragging hour.  Those who lacked overcoats and blankets—­and some there were who lacked both—­would half freeze at night.  For food they would have slops dished up for them at such stopping places as this present one, and they would slake their thirst on water drawn from contaminated wayside wells and be glad of the chance.  Gangrene