Later on I watched Doctor DePage operate at this hospital.  I was put into a uniform, and watched a piece of shell taken from a man’s brain and a great blood clot evacuated.  Except for the red cross on each window and the rattle of the sash under the guns, I might have been in one of the leading American hospitals and war a century away.  There were the same white uniforms on the surgeons; the same white gauze covering their heads and swathing their faces to the eyes; the same silence, the same care as to sterilisation; the same orderly rows of instruments on a glass stand; the same nurses, alert and quiet; the same clear white electric light overhead; the same rubber gloves, the same anaesthetists and assistants.

It was twelve minutes from the time the operating surgeon took the knife until the wound was closed.  The head had been previously shaved by one of the assistants, and painted with iodine.  In twelve minutes the piece of shell lay in my hand.  The stertorous breathing was easier, bandages were being adjusted, the next case was being anaesthetised and prepared.

I wish I could go further.  I wish I could follow that peasant-soldier to recovery and health.  I wish I could follow him back to his wife and children, to his little farm in Belgium.  I wish I could even say he recovered.  But I cannot.  I do not know.  The war is a series of incidents with no beginning and no end.  The veil lifts for a moment and drops again.

I saw other cases brought down for operation at the Ambulance Ocean.  One I shall never forget.  Here was a boy again, looking up with hopeful, fully conscious eyes at the surgeons.  He had been shot through the spine.  From his waist down he was inert, helpless.  He smiled.  He had come to be operated on.  Now all would be well.  The great surgeons would work over him, and he would walk again.

When after a long consultation they had to tell him they could not operate, I dared not look at his eyes.

Again, what is he to do?  Where is he to go?  He is helpless, in a strange land.  He has no country, no people, no money.  And he will live, think of it!

I wish I could leaven all this with something cheerful.  I wish I could smile over the phonograph playing again and again A Wee Deoch-an’-Doris in that room for convalescents that overlooks the sea.  I wish I could think that the baby with both legs off will grow up without missing what it has never known.  I wish I could be reconciled because the dead young officer had died the death of a patriot and a soldier, or that the boy I saw dying in an upper room, from shock and loss of blood following an amputation, is only a pawn in the great chess game of empires.  I wish I could believe that the two women on the floor below, one with both arms gone, another with one arm off and her back ripped open by a shell, are the legitimate fruits of a holy war.  I cannot.  I can see only greed and lust of battle and ambition.