At night we went to the railway-sheds and dressed wounds.  I made them do the Germans; but it was too late for one of them—­a handsome young fellow with both his feet deep blue with frost-bite, his leg broken, and a great wound in his thigh.  He had not been touched for eight days.  Another man had a great hole right through his arm and shoulder.  The dressing was rough and ready.  The surgeons clapped a great wad of lint into the hole and we bound it up.  There is no hot water, no sterilising, no cyanide gauze even, but iodine saves many lives, and we have plenty of it.  The German boy was dying when we left.  His eyes above the straw began to look glazed and dim.  Death, at least, is merciful.

We work so late at the railway-sheds that I lie in bed till lunch time.  Lady Bagot and I go to the sheds in the evening and stay there till 1 a.m.

11 November.  Boulogne.—­I got a letter from Julia yesterday, telling me that Alan is wounded and in hospital at Boulogne, and asking me to go and see him.

I came here this morning and had to run about for a long time before I started getting a “laissez-passer” for the road, as spies are being shot almost at sight now.  By good chance I got a motor-car which brought me all the way; trains are uncertain, and filled with troops, and one never knows when they will arrive.

[Page Heading:  STORIES OF THE BRITISH FRONT]

I found poor old Alan at the Base Hospital, in terrible pain, poor boy, but not dangerously wounded.  He has been through an awful time, and nearly all the officers of his regiment have been killed or wounded.  For my part, in spite of his pain, I can thank God that he is out of the firing-line for a bit.  The horror of the war has got right into him, and he has seen things which few boys of eighteen can have witnessed.  Eight days in the trenches at Ypres under heavy fire day and night is a pretty severe test, and Alan has behaved splendidly.  He told me the most awful tales of what he had seen, but I believe it did him good to get things off his chest, so I listened.  The thing he found the most ghastly was the fact that when a trench has been taken or lost the wounded and dying and dead are left out in the open.  He says that firing never ceases, and it is impossible to reach these men, who die of starvation within sight of their comrades.

“Sometimes,” Alan said, “we see them raise themselves on an arm for an instant, and they yell to us to come to them, but we can’t.”

His own wound was received when the Germans “got their range to an inch” and began shelling their trenches.  A whole company next to Alan was wiped out, and he started to go back to tell his Colonel the trench could not be held.  The communication trench by which he went was not quite finished, and he had to get out into the open and race across to where the unfinished trench began again.  Poor child, running for his life!  He was badly hit in the groin, but managed just to tumble into the next bit of the trench, where he found two men who carried him, pouring with blood, to his Colonel.  He was hastily bound up and carried four miles on crossed rifles to the hospital at Ypres, where his wound was properly dressed, and after an hour he was put on the train for Boulogne.