[Sidenote:  Holding up a boy too weak to stand.]

The English girl said, “You hold him up while I get a stretcher”; so I jammed myself up against the side of a building and put my arms about the boy while his weight grew heavier and heavier against me.  I could not let him slip, because the roadway was narrow and a long string of ambulances, without lights, was passing.  He never uttered a sound, but his arms moved convulsively.  As he felt himself growing weaker, he put them around my neck, and clung to me precisely as a frightened child would.  It seemed an age while I waited there, warning off ambulances that were about to shave us too closely.  I could not help wondering where that boy’s mother was, what she was doing, or if he had a mother.  And I thought some terrible thoughts about war and some wicked ones about Germans.

[Sidenote:  Dispensing food to the wounded.]

The girl came with her stretcher at last, and we got the boy on it.  Then we went about setting up our feeding station.  Hungry men limped in, bandaged mostly about the head, and how they consumed hard boiled eggs and drank hot chocolate!  I left the English girl dispensing food and drink, while I took to the badly wounded a mixture of beaten egg, hot milk and sugar.  Here and there men asked for a piece of chocolate or bread, but most of the wounded wanted only the liquid food.  They would say with their awful English cockney accent, “Ah! that’s good!” or “Prime stuff!” or “Could you spare a little more, sister?” In spite of dreadful wounds, they were full of pluck.

[Sidenote:  Great numbers of wounded in stretchers.]

For the next two hours I gave water and egg mixture to all sorts and conditions of men—­English, French, Canadians, Moroccans, Senegalese.  The doctor asked if I knew enough to administer morphine hypodermics, and I regretfully admitted that I did not, while I registered a vow to learn.  Then some American Red Cross men appeared, and some English doctors.  Before midnight three or four long Red Cross trains had been filled with wounded, and sent out.  Yet at that hour more than five hundred wounded men still lay on their stretchers on the grass outside.  And all the while, as I worked, I thought of how, as soon as the moon came up, we should hear the familiar roar and rattle of the bombs, and of how the shrapnel and machine gun bullets would rain down on those upturned faces.

[Sidenote:  The hospital floors are crowded.]

But, grace to heaven, the Germans did not come that night!  At midnight I went into Ward 4, where some of the worst wounded had been placed.  Stretchers had been laid on top of the beds and flat on the floor on both sides of the central aisle, till one could hardly move.  Most of the wounded seemed to sleep.  Only here and there one begged for water, and these men were usually wounded in the abdomen where not even water could be given.  We could moisten their lips and wipe off the hot feverish faces, and that was all.