[Page Heading:  A DRAMATIC INCIDENT]

7 November.  St. Malo les Bains.—­Lady Bagot turned up here to-day, and I lunched with her at the Hotel des Arcades.  Just before lunch a bomb was dropped from a Taube overhead, and hardly had we sat down to lunch when a revolver shot rang through the room.  A French officer had discharged his pistol by mistake, and he lay on the floor in his scarlet trews.  The scene was really the Adelphi, and as the man had only slightly hurt himself one was able to appreciate the scenic effect and to notice how well staged it was.  A waiter ran for me.  I ran for dressings to one of our ambulances, and we knelt in the right attitude beside the hero in his scarlet clothes, while the “lady of the bureau” begged for the bullet!

In the evening Lady Bagot and I worked at the railway-sheds till 3 a.m.  One immense shed had 700 wounded in it.  The night scene, with its inevitable accompaniment of low-turned lamps and gloom, was one I shall not forget.  The railway-lines on each side of the covered platform were spread with straw, and on this wounded men, bedded down like cattle, slept.  There were rows of them sleeping feet to feet, with straw over them to make a covering.  I didn’t hear a grumble, and hardly a groan.  Most of them slept heavily.

Near the door was a row of Senegalese, their black faces and gleaming eyes looking strange above the straw; and further on were some Germans, whom the French authorities would not allow our men to touch; then rows of men of every colour and blood; Zouaves, with their picturesque dress all grimed and colourless; Turcos, French, and Belgians.  Nearly all had their heads and hands bound up in filthy dressings.  We went into the dressing-station at the far end of the great shed and dressed wounds till about 3 o’clock, then we passed through the long long lines of sleeping wounded men again and went home.

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To Lady Clementine Waring.

8 November. MY DEAREST CLEMMIE,

I have a big job for you.  Will you do it?  I know you are the person for it, and you will be prompt and interested.

The wounded are suffering from hunger as much as from their wounds.  In most places, such as dressing-stations and railway-stations, nothing is provided for them at all, and many men are left for two or three days without food.

I wish I could describe it all to you!  These wounded men are picked up after a fight and taken anywhere—­very often to some farmhouse or inn, where a Belgian surgeon claps something on to the wounds or ties on a splint, and then our (Dr. Munro’s) ambulances come along and bring the men into the Field Hospital if they are very bad, or if not they are taken direct to a station and left there.  They may, and often do, have to wait for hours till a train loads up and starts.  Even those who are brought to the Field Hospital have to turn