* * * * *

That night in my hotel, after dinner, Gertrude, Lady Decies, told me the following story: 

“I had only twelve hours’ notice to start for the front.  I am not a hospital nurse, but I have taken for several years three months each summer of special training.  So I felt that I would be useful if I could get over.

“It was November and very cold.  When I got to Calais there was not a room to be had anywhere.  But at the Hotel Centrale they told me I might have a bathroom to sleep in.

“At the last moment a gentleman volunteered to exchange with me.  But the next day he left, so that night I slept in a bathtub with a mattress in it!

“The following day I got a train for Dunkirk.  On the way the train was wrecked.  Several coaches left the track, and there was nothing to do but to wait until they were put back on.

“I went to the British Consul at Dunkirk and asked him where I could be most useful.  He said to go to the railroad station at once.

“I went to the station.  The situation there was horrible.  Three doctors and seven dressers were working on four-hour shifts.

“As the wounded came in only at night, that was when we were needed.  I worked all night from that time on.  My first night we had eleven hundred men.  Some of them were dead when they were lifted out onto the stone floor of the station shed.  One boy flung himself out of the door.  I caught him as he fell and he died in my arms.  He had diphtheria, as well as being wounded.

“The station was frightfully cold, and the men had to be laid on the stone floors with just room for moving about between them.  There was no heat of any sort.  The dead were laid in rows, one on top of another, on cattle trucks.  As fast as a man died they took his body away and brought in another wounded man.

“Every now and then the electric lights would go out and leave us there in black darkness.  Finally we got candles and lamps for emergencies.

“We had no surgical dressings, but we had some iodine.  The odours were fearful.  Some of the men had not had their clothes off for five weeks.  Their garments were like boards.  It was almost impossible to cut through them.  And underneath they were coated with vermin.  Their bodies were black with them frequently.

“In many cases the wounds were green through lack of attention.  One man, I remember, had fifteen.  The first two nights I was there we had no water, which made it terrible.  There was a pump outside, but the water was bad.  At last we had a little stove set up, and I got some kettles and jugs and boiled the water.

“We were obliged to throw the bandages in a heap on the floor, and night after night we walked about in blood.  My clothing and stockings were stained with blood to my knees.

“After the first five nights I kept no record of the number of wounded; but the first night we had eleven hundred; the second night, nine hundred; the third night, seven hundred and fifty; the fourth night, two thousand; the fifth night, fifteen hundred.