“Be careful. ...  He might fall in half.”

I thought over these words as I put my hands under the warm body and helped to lift its weight on to the stretcher.  Yes, some of the shell wounds were rather big.  One could hardly sew a man together again with bits of cotton...  It was only afterwards, when I had helped to put the stretcher in a separate room on the other side of the courtyard, that a curious trembling took possession of me for a moment...  The horror of it all!  Were the virtues which were supposed to come from war, “the binding strength of nations,” “the cleansing of corruption,” all the falsities of men who make excuses for this monstrous crime, worth the price that was being paid in pain and tears and death?  It is only the people who sit at home who write these things.  When one is in the midst of war false heroics are blown out of one’s soul by all its din and tumult of human agony.  One learns that courage itself exists, in most cases, as the pride in the heart of men very much afraid—­a pride which makes them hide their fear.  They do not become more virtuous in war, but only reveal the virtue that is in them.  The most heroic courage which came into the courtyard at Furnes was not that of the stretcher-bearers who went out under fire, but that of the doctors and nurses who tended the wounded, toiling ceaselessly in the muck of blood, amidst all those sights and sounds.  My spirit bowed before them as I watched them at work.  I was proud if I could carry soup to any of them when they came into the refectory for a hurried meal, or if I could wash a plate clean so that they might fill it with a piece of meat from the kitchen stew.  I would have cleaned their boots for them if it had been worth while cleaning boots to tramp the filthy yard.

“It’s not surgery!” said one of the young surgeons, coming out of the operating-theatre and washing his hands at the kitchen sink; “it’s butchery!”

He told me that he had never seen such wounds or imagined them, and as for the conditions in which he worked—­he raised his hands and laughed at the awfulness of them, because it is best to laugh when there is no remedy.  There was a scarcity of dressings, of instruments, of sterilizers.  The place was so crowded that there was hardly room to turn, and wounded men poured in so fast that it was nothing but hacking and sewing.

“I’m used to blood,” said the young surgeon.  “It’s some years now since I was put through my first ordeal, of dissecting dead bodies and then handling living tissue.  You know how it’s done—­by gradual stages until a student no longer wants to faint at the sight of raw flesh, but regards it as so much material for scientific work.  But this!”—­he looked towards the room into which the wounded came—­“It’s getting on my nerves a little.  It’s the sense of wanton destruction that makes one loathe it, the utter senselessness of it all, the waste of such good stuff.  War is a hellish game and I’m so sorry for all the poor Belgians who are getting it in the neck.  They didn’t ask for it!”