The cries of the wounded men died down and whimpered out into a dull faint moaning.

A laugh came chuckling behind an ambulance.

“Hot? ...  I should think it was!  But we picked the men up and crossed the bridge all right...  The shells were falling on every side of us. ...  I was pretty scared, you bet...  It’s a bit too thick, you know!”

Silence again.  Then a voice speaking quietly across the yard: 

“Anyone to lend a hand?  There’s a body to be carried out.”

I helped to carry out the body, as every one helped to do any small work if he had his hands free at the moment.  It was the saving of one’s sanity and self-respect.  Yet to me, more sensitive perhaps than it is good to be, it was a moral test almost greater than my strength of will to enter that large room where the wounded lay, and to approach a dead man through a lane of dying. (So many of them died after a night in our guest-house.  Not all the skill of surgeons could patch up some of those bodies, torn open with ghastly wounds from German shells.) The smell of wet and muddy clothes, coagulated blood and gangrened limbs, of iodine and chloroform, sickness and sweat of agony, made a stench which struck one’s senses with a foul blow.  I used to try and close my nostrils to it, holding my breath lest I should vomit.  I used to try to keep my eyes upon the ground, to avoid the sight of those smashed faces, and blinded eyes, and tattered bodies, lying each side of me in the hospital cots, or in the stretchers set upon the floor between them.  I tried to shut my eyes to the sounds in this room, the hideous snuffle of men drawing their last breaths, the long-drawn moans of men in devilish pain, the ravings of fever-stricken men crying like little children—­“Maman!  O Maman!”—­or repeating over and over again some angry protest against a distant comrade.

But sights and sounds and smells forced themselves upon one’s senses.  I had to look and to listen and to breathe in the odour of death and corruption.  For hours afterwards I would be haunted with the death face of some young man, lying half-naked on his bed while nurses dressed his horrible wounds.  What waste of men!  What disfigurement of the beauty that belongs to youth!  Bearded soldier faces lay here in a tranquillity that told of coming death.  They had been such strong and sturdy men, tilling their Flemish fields, and living with a quiet faith in their hearts.  Now they were dying before their time, conscious, some of them, that death was near, so that weak tears dropped upon their beards, and in their eyes was a great fear and anguish.

“Je ne veux pas mourir!” said one of them.  “O ma pauvre femme!  Je ne veux pas mourir!”

He did not wish to die... but in the morning he was dead.

The corpse that I had to carry out lay pinned up in a sheet.  The work had been very neatly done by the nurse.  She whispered to me as I stood on one side of the bed, with a friend on the other side.