Half a minute after the train stopped a procession was moving toward us, made up of men who had wriggled down or who had been eased down out of the cars, and who were coming to the converted buffet room for help.  Mostly they came afoot, sometimes holding on to one another for mutual support.  Perhaps one in five was borne bodily by an orderly.  He might be hunched in the orderly’s arms like a weary child, or he might be traveling upon the orderly’s back, pack-fashion, with his arms gripped about the bearer’s neck; and then, in such a case, the pair of them, with the white hollow face of the wounded man nodding above the sweated red face of the other, became a monstrosity with two heads and one pair of legs.

Here, advancing toward us with the gait of a doddering grandsire, would be a boy in his teens, bent double and clutching his middle with both hands.  Here would be a man whose hand had been smashed, and from beyond the rude swathings of cotton his fingers protruded stiffly and were so congested and swollen they looked like fat red plantains.  Here was a man whose feet were damaged.  He had a crutch made of a spade handle.  Next would be a man with a hole in his neck, and the bandages had pulled away from about his throat, showing the raw inflamed hole.  In this parade I saw a French infantryman aided along by a captured Zouave on one side and on the other by a German sentry who swung his loaded carbine in his free hand.  Behind them I saw an awful nightmare of a man—­a man whose face and bare cropped head and hands and shoes were all of a livid, poisonous, green cast.  A shell of some new and particularly devilish variety had burst near him and the fumes which it generated in bursting had dyed him green.  Every man would have, tied about his neck or to one of his buttonholes, the German field-doctor’s card telling of the nature of his hurt and the place where he had sustained it; and the uniform of nearly every one would be discolored with dried blood, and where the coat gaped open you marked that the harsh, white cambric lining was made harsher still by stiff, brownish-red streakings.

In at the door of the improvised hospital filed the parade, and the wounded men dropped on the floor or else were lowered upon chairs and tables and cots—­anywhere that there was space for them to huddle up or stretch out.  And then the overworked surgeons, French and German, and the German nursing sisters and certain of the orderlies would fall to.  There was no time for the finer, daintier proceedings that might have spared the sufferers some measure of their agony.  It was cut away the old bandage, pull off the filthy cotton, dab with antiseptics what was beneath, pour iodine or diluted acid upon the bare and shrinking tissues, perhaps do that with the knife or probe which must be done where incipient mortification had set in, clap on fresh cotton, wind a strip of cloth over it, pin it in place and send this man away to be fed—­providing he could eat; then turn to the next poor wretch.  The first man was out of that place almost before the last man was in; that was how fast the work went forward.