“I have been here since the very first,” he said; “since the day after our troops took this town, and God knows how many thousands of wounded men—­Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Turcos, some Belgians—­have passed through my hands; but as yet I have to see a man who has been wounded by a saber or a lance.  I saw one bayonet wound yesterday or the day before.  The man had fallen on his own bayonet and driven it into his side.  Shrapnel wounds?  Yes.  Wounds from fragments of bombs?  Again, yes.  Bullet wounds?  I can’t tell you how many of those I have seen, but surely many thousands.  But no bayonet wounds.  This is a war of hot lead, not of cold steel.  I read of these bayonet charges, but I do not believe that many such stories are true.”

I didn’t believe it either.

The train which followed after the first, coming up out of France, furnished for us much the same sights the first one had furnished, and so, with some slight variations, did the third train and the fourth and all the rest of them.  The station became a sty where before it had been a kennel; the flies multiplied; the stenches increased in volume and strength, if such were possible; the windows of the littered waiting room, with their cracked half panes, were like ribald eyes winking at the living afflictions which continually trailed past them; the floors looked as though there had been a snowstorm.

A train came, whose occupants were nearly all wounded by shrapnel.  Wounds of the head, the face and the neck abounded among these men—­for the shells, exploding in the air above where they crouched in their trenches, had bespattered them with iron pebbles.  Each individual picture of! suffering recurred with such monotonous and regular frequency that after an hour or so it took something out of the common run—­an especially vivid splash of daubed and crimson horror—­to quicken our imaginations and make us fetch out our note books.  I recall a young lieutenant of Uhlans who had been wounded in the breast by fragments of a grenade, which likewise had smashed in several of his ribs.  He proudly fingered his newly acquired Iron Cross while the surgeon relaced his battered torso with strips of gauze.  Afterward he asked me for a cigar, providing I had one to spare, saying he had not tasted tobacco for a week and was perishing for a smoke.  We began to take note then how the wounded men watched us as we puffed at our cigars, and we realized they were dumbly envying us each mouthful of smoke.  So we sent our chauffeur to the public market with orders to buy all the cigars he could find on sale there.  He presently returned with the front and rear seats of the automobile piled high with bundled sheaves of the brown weed—­you can get an astonishingly vast number of those domestic French cigars for the equivalent of thirty dollars in American money—­and we turned the whole cargo over to the head nurse on condition that, until the supply was exhausted, she give a cigar to every hurt soldier who might crave one, regardless of his nationality.  She cried as she thanked us for the small charity.