I did not go directly to the dining-room, but sat on one of the high-backed benches on the platform and began to read the papers.  The Unteroffizier looked out and found me fairly buried in them.  He returned a little later and saw me asleep—­or thought he did.

When he had gone I sauntered along the platform into the dining-room, to find it vacant save for a youthful waiter and a barmaid.  I walked straight to the window—­where the light would be better for reading—­and ordered bread and Edam cheese, tearing off a fifty gram amount from my Berlin bread ticket, which was fortunately good in Potsdam.

My position enabled me to look right out upon the square below, but rendered me inconspicuous from the street.

By this time the wounded were being moved from the train.  The slightly wounded were drawn up in double ranks, their clean white arm- and head-bandages gleaming in the noonday light.  They stood dazed and dejected, looking on at the real work which was just beginning—­the removal of the severely wounded.

Then it was that I learned the use of those mammoth furniture vans.  Then it was I realised that these vans are part of Germany’s plans by which her wounded are carried—­I will not say secretly, but as unobtrusively as possible.  In some of the mammoths were put twelve, into others fourteen; others held as many as twenty.

The Prussian Guard had come home.  The steel corps of the army of Germany had met near Contalmaison the light-hearted boys I had seen drilling in Hyde Park last year, and in a furious counter-attack, in which they had attempted to regain the village, had been wiped out.

These were not merely wounded, but dejected wounded.  The whole atmosphere of the scene was that of intense surprise and depression.  Tradition going back to Frederick the Great, nearly two hundred years ago, had been smashed—­by amateur soldiers.  The callow youth of sixteen who served my lunch was muttering something to the barmaid, who replied that he was lucky to be in a class that was not likely to be called up yet.

The extreme cases were carried at a snail’s pace by bearers, who put their feet down as carefully as if they were testing very thin ice, and who placed the comfortable spring stretchers in the very few vehicles which had rubber or imitation rubber tyres.  The work was done with military precision and great celerity.  The evacuation of this train was no sooner finished than another took its place, and the same scene was repeated.  Presently the great furniture vans returned from having deposited their terrible loads, and were again filled.  One van was reserved for those who had expired on the journey, and it was full.

This, then, was the battered remnant of the five Reserve regiments of the Prussian Guard which had charged the British lines at Contalmaison three weeks before in a desperate German counter-attack to wrest the village from the enemy, who had just occupied it.  Each train discharged between six and seven hundred maimed passengers.  Nor was this the last day of the influx.