That courtyard in the convent at Furnes will always haunt my mind as the scene of a grim drama.  Sometimes, standing there alone, in the darkness, by the side of an ambulance, I used to look up at the stars and wonder what God might think of all this work if there were any truth in old faiths.  A pretty mess we mortals made of life!  I might almost have laughed at the irony of it all, except that my laughter would have choked in my throat and turned me sick.  They were beasts, and worse than beasts, to maim and mutilate each other like this, having no real hatred in their hearts for each other, but only a stupid perplexity that they should be hurled in masses against each other’s ranks, to slash and shoot and burn in obedience to orders by people who were their greatest enemies—­Ministers of State, with cold and calculating brains, high inhuman officers who studied battlefields as greater chessboards.  So I—­a little black ant in a shadow on the earth under the eternal sky—­used to think like this, and to stop thinking these silly irritating thoughts turned to the job in hand, which generally was to take up one end of a stretcher laden with a bloody man, or to give my shoulder to a tall soldier who leaned upon it and stumbled forward to an open door which led to the operating-table and an empty bed, where he might die if his luck were out.

The courtyard was always full of stir and bustle in the hours when the ambulance convoys came in with their cargoes of men rescued from the firing zone.  The headlights of the cars thrust shafts of blinding light into the darkness as they steered round in the steep and narrow road which led to the convent gates between two high thick walls, and then, with a grinding and panting, came inside to halt beside cars already at a standstill.  The cockney voices of the chauffeurs called to each other.

“Blast yer, Bill...  Carn’t yer give a bit of elber room?  Gord almighty, ’ow d’yer think I can get in there?”

Women came out into the yard, their white caps touched by the light of their lanterns, and women’s voices spoke quietly.

“Have you got many this time?” “We can hardly find an inch of room.”  “It’s awful having to use stretchers for beds.”  “There were six deaths this afternoon.”

Then would follow a silence or a whispering of stretcher-bearers, telling their adventures to a girl in khaki breeches, standing with one hand in her jacket pocket, and with the little flare of a cigarette glowing upon her cheek and hair.

“All safe? ...  That was luck!”

“O mon Dieu!  O, cre nom!  O!  O!”

It was a man’s voice crying in agony, rising to a shuddering, blood-curdling scream: 

“O Jesus!  O!  O!”

One could not deafen one’s ears against that note of human agony.  It pierced into one’s soul.  One could only stand gripping one’s hands in this torture chamber, with darkness between high walls, and with shadows making awful noises out of the gulfs of blackness.