The wooden gates opened to let in another ambulance full of Belgian wounded, and the young surgeon nodded to me with a smile.

“Another little lot!  I must get back into the slaughterhouse.  So long!”

I helped out one of the “sitting-up” cases—­a young man with a wound in his chest, who put his arm about my neck and said, “Merci!  Merci!” with a fine courtesy, until suddenly he went limp, so that I had to hold him with all my strength, while he vomited blood down my coat.  I had to get help to carry him indoors.

And yet there was laughter in the convent where so many men lay wounded.  It was only by gaiety and the quick capture of any jest that those doctors and nurses and ambulance girls could keep their nerves steady.  So in the refectory, when they sat down for a meal, there was an endless fire of raillery, and the blue-eyed boy with the blond hair used to crow like Peter Pan and speak a wonderful mixture of French and English, and play the jester gallantly.  There would be processions of plate-bearers to the kitchen next door, where a splendid Englishwoman—­one of those fine square-faced, brown-eyed, cheerful souls—­had been toiling all day in the heat of oven and stoves to cook enough food for fifty-five hungry people who could not wait for their meals.  There was a scramble between two doctors for the last potatoes, and a duel between one of them and myself in the slicing up of roast beef or boiled mutton, and amorous advances to the lady cook for a tit-bit in the baking-pan.  There never was such a kitchen, and a County Council inspector would have reported on it in lurid terms.  The sink was used as a wash-place by surgeons, chauffeurs, and stretcher-bearers.  Nurses would come through with bloody rags from the ward, which was only an open door away.  Lightly wounded men, covered with Yser mud, would sit at a side table, eating the remnants of other people’s meals.  Above the sizzling of sausages and the clatter of plates one could hear the moaning of the wounded and the incessant monologue of the fever-stricken.  And yet it is curious I look back upon that convent kitchen as a place of gaiety, holding many memories of comradeship, and as a little sanctuary from the misery of war.  I was a scullion in it, at odd hours of the day and night when I was not following the ambulance wagons to the field, or helping to clean the courtyard or doing queer little jobs which some one had to do.

“I want you to dig a hole and help me to bury an arm,” said one of the nurses.  “Do you mind?”

I spent another hour helping a lady to hang up blankets, not very well washed, because they were still stained with blood, and not very sanitary, because the line was above a pile of straw upon which men had died.  There were many rubbish heaps in the courtyard near which it was not wise to linger, and always propped against the walls were stretchers soppy with blood, or with great dark stains upon them where blood had dried.  It was like the courtyard of a shambles, this old convent enclosure, and indeed it was exactly that, except that the animals were not killed outright, but lingered in their pain.