Lodz is a large cotton manufacturing town—­sometimes called the Manchester of Poland—­but now of course all the factories were closed, and many destroyed by shell.  I should not think it was a very festive place at the best of times; it looked squalid and grimy, and the large bulk of its population was made up of the most abject Jews I have ever seen.

We had to make a long detour and get into the town by an unfrequented country road, as Lodz was being heavily bombarded by the German guns.  We were put down at a large building which we were told was the military hospital.  Princess V., Colonel S., and a Russian student were working hard in the operating-room, and we hastily put on clean overalls and joined them.  They all looked absolutely worn out, and the doctor dropped asleep between each case; but fresh wounded were being brought in every minute and there was no one else to help.  Lodz was one big hospital.  We heard that there were more than 18,000 wounded there, and I can well believe it.  Every building of any size had been turned into a hospital, and almost all the supplies of every kind had given out.

The building we were in had been a day-school, and the top floor was made up of large airy schoolrooms that were quite suitable for wards.  But the shelling recommenced so violently that the wounded all had to be moved down to the ground floor and into the cellars.  The place was an absolute inferno.  I could never have imagined anything worse.  It was fearfully cold, and the hospital was not heated at all, for there was no wood or coal in Lodz, and for the same reason the gas-jets gave out only the faintest glimmer of light.  There was no clean linen, and the poor fellows were lying there still in their verminous, blood-soaked shirts, shivering with cold, as we had only one small blanket each for them.  They were lucky if they had a bed at all, for many were lying with only a little straw between them and the cold stone floor.  There were no basins or towels or anything to wash up with, and no spittoons, so the men were spitting all over the already filthy floor.  In the largest ward where there were seventy or eighty men lying, there was a lavatory adjoining which had got blocked up, and a thin stream of dirty water trickled under the door and meandered in little rivulets all over the room.  The smell was awful, as some of the men had been there already several days without having had their dressings done.

This was the state in which the hospital had been handed over to us.  It was a military hospital whose staff had had orders to leave at four o’clock that morning, and they handed the whole hospital with its 270 patients over to us just as it was; and we could do very little towards making it more comfortable for them.  The stench of the whole place was horrible, but it was too cold to do more than open the window for a minute or two every now and then.  It was no one’s fault that things were in such a horrible condition—­it was just the force of circumstances and the fortune of war that the place had been taxed far beyond its possible capacities.