Having helped to wash up—­the young surgeons fell into queue before the washtubs—­I went out into the courtyard again.  Horses were stabled there, guarded by a man who read a book by the rays of an old lantern, which was a little oasis of light in this desert of darkness.  The horses were listening.  Every now and then they jerked their heads up in a frightened way.  From a few miles away came the boom of great guns, and the black sky quivered with tremulous bars of light as shell after shell burst somewhere over the heads of men waiting for death.  With one of the doctors, two of the nurses, and a man who led the way, I climbed up to a high room in the convent roof.  Through a dormer window we looked out across the flat country beyond Furnes and saw, a few miles away, the lines of battle.  Some village was burning there, a steady torch under a heavy cloud of smoke made rosy and beautiful as a great flower over the scarlet flames.  Shells were bursting with bouquets of light and then scattered stars into the sky.  Short, sharp stabs revealed a Belgian battery, and very clearly we could hear the roll of field guns, followed by enormous concussions of heavy artillery.

“There will be work to do to-morrow!” said one of the nurses.  Work came before it was expected in the morning Quite early some Belgian ambulances came up to the great gate of the convent loaded with wounded.  A few beds were made ready for them and they were brought in by the stretcher-bearers and dressers.  Some of them could stagger in alone, with the help of a strong arm, but others were at the point of death as they lay rigid on their stretchers, wet with blood.  For the first time I felt the weight of a man who lies unconscious, and strained my stomach as I helped to carry these poor Belgian soldiers.  And for the first time I had round my neck the arm of a man who finds each footstep a torturing effort, and who after a pace or two halts and groans, and loses the strength of his legs, so that all his weight hangs upon that clinging arm.  Several times I nearly let these soldiers fall, so great was the burden weighing down my shoulders.  It was only by a kind of prayer that I could hold them up and guide them to the great room where stretchers were laid out for lack of beds.

In a little while the great hall where I had helped to sort out packages was a hospital ward where doctors and nurses worked very quietly and from which there came faint groans of anguish, horrible in their significance.  Already it was filled with that stench of blood and dirt and iodoform which afterwards used to sicken me as I helped to carry in the wounded or carry out the dead.

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