One special horror was spared:  The patients made no outcry.  They gritted their teeth and writhed where they lay, but none shrieked out.  Indeed, neither here nor at any of the other places where I saw wounded men did we hear that chorus of moans and shrieks with which fiction always has invested such scenes.  Those newly struck seemed stunned into silence; those who had had time to recover from the first shock of being struck appeared buoyed and sustained by a stoic quality which lifted them, mute and calm, above the call of tortured nerves and torn flesh.  Those who were delirious might call out; those who were conscious locked their lips and were steadfast.  In all our experience I came upon just two men in their senses who gave way at all.  One was a boy of nineteen or twenty, in a field hospital near Rheims, whose kneecap had been smashed.  He sat up on his bed, rocking his body and whimpering fretfully like an infant.  He had been doing that for days, a nurse told us, but whether he whimpered because of his suffering or at the thought of going through life with a stiffened leg she did not know.  The other was here at Maubeuge.  I helped hold his right arm steady while a surgeon took the bandages off his hand.  When the wrapping came away a shattered finger came with it—­it had rotted off, if you care to know that detail—­and at the sight the victim uttered growling, rasping, animal-like sounds.  Even so, I think it was the thing he saw more than the pain of it that overcame him; the pain he could have borne.  He had been bearing it for days.

I particularly remember one other man who was brought in off this first train.  He was a young giant.  For certain the old father of Frederick the Great would have had him in his regiment of Grenadier Guards.  Well, for that matter, he was a grenadier in the employ of the same family now.  He hobbled in under his own motive power and leaned against the wall until the first flurry was over.  Then, at a nod from one of the shirt-sleeved surgeons, he stretched himself upon a bare wooden table which had just been vacated and indicated that he wanted relief for his leg—­which leg, I recall, was incased in a rude, splintlike arrangement of plaited straw.  The surgeon took off the straw and the packing beneath it.  The giant had a hole right through his knee, from side to side, and the flesh all about it was horribly swollen and purplish-black.  So the surgeon soused the joint, wound and all, with iodine; the youth meanwhile staring blandly up at the ceiling with his arms crossed on his wide breast.  I stood right by him, looking into his face, and he didn’t so much as bat an eyelid.  But he didn’t offer to get up when the surgeon was done with treating him.  He turned laboriously over on his face, pulling his shirt free from his body as he did so, and then we saw that he had a long, infected gash from a glancing bullet across the small of his back.  He had been lying on one angry wound while the other was redressed.  You marveled, not that he had endured it without blenching, but that he had endured it at all.