The ambulances come up.  They cannot come as far as the trenches, but stretchers are brought and the wounded men are lifted out as tenderly as possible.

Many soldiers have tried to tell of the horrors of a night journey in an ambulance or transport; careful driving is out of the question.  Near the front the ambulance can have no lights, and the roads everywhere have been torn up by shells.

Men die in transit, and, dying, hark back to early days.  They call for their mothers, for their wives.  They dictate messages that no one can take down.  Unloaded at railway stations, the dead are separated from the living and piled in tiers on trucks.  The wounded lie about on stretchers on the station floor.  Sometimes they are operated on there, by the light of a candle, it may be, or of a smoking lamp.  When it is a well-equipped station there is the mercy of chloroform, the blessed release of morphia, but more times than I care to think of at night, there has been no chloroform and no morphia.

France has sixty hospital trains, England twelve, Belgium not so many.

I have seen trains drawing in with their burden of wounded men.  They travel slowly, come to a gradual stop, without jolting or jarring; but instead of the rush of passengers to alight, which usually follows the arrival of a train, there is silence, infinite quiet.  Then, somewhere, a door is unhurriedly opened.  Maybe a priest alights and looks about him.  Perhaps it is a nurse who steps down and takes a comprehensive survey of conditions.  There is no talking, no uproar.  A few men may come up to assist in lifting out the stretchers, an ambulance driver who salutes and indicates with a gesture where his car is stationed.  There are no onlookers.  This is business, the grim business of war.  The line of stretchers on the station platform grows.  The men lie on them, impassive.  They have waited so long.  They have lain on the battlefield, in the trench, behind the line at the dressing shed, waiting, always waiting.  What is a little time more or less, now?

The patience of the injured!  I have been in many hospitals.  I have seen pneumonia and typhoid patients lying in the fearful apathy of disease.  They are very sad to see, very tragic, but their patience is the lethargy of half consciousness.  Their fixed eyes see visions.  The patience of the wounded is the resignation of alert faculties.

Once I saw a boy dying.  He was a dark-haired, brown-eyed lad of eighteen.  He had had a leg shattered the day before, and he had lain for hours unattended on the battlefield.  The leg had been amputated, and he was dying of loss of blood.

He lay alone, in a small room of what had once been a girls’ school.  He had asked to be propped up with pillows, so that he could breathe.  His face was grey, and only his eyes were alive.  They burned like coals.  He was alone.  The hospital was crowded, and there were others who could be saved.  So he lay there, propped high, alone, and as conscious as I am now, and waited.  The nurse came back at last, and his eyes greeted her.