“Quick,” said the doctor.  He pushed her in front of him, and she almost fell down a flight of mud-covered steps that led into the earth.  She found herself in a long, low gallery, lighted by a dim oil lamp, suspended from the blackened roof.  A shelf ran along one side of it, covered with straw.  Three men lay there.  The straw was soaked with their blood.  They had been brought in the night before by the stretcher-bearers.  A young surgeon was rearranging their splints and bandages, and redressing their wounds.  They would lie there for another hour or so, and then start for their twenty kilometre drive over shell-ridden roads to one or another of the great hospitals at the base.  While she was there, two more cases were brought in.  The doctor gave but a glance at the first one and then made a sign; and the bearers passed on with him to the further end of the gallery.  He seemed to understand, for he gave a low, despairing cry and the tears sprang to his eyes.  He was but a boy.  The other had a foot torn off.  One of the orderlies gave him two round pieces of wood to hold in his hands while the young surgeon cut away the hanging flesh and bound up the stump.

The doctor had been whispering to one of the bearers.  He had the face of an old man, but his shoulders were broad and he looked sturdy.  He nodded, and beckoned Joan to follow him up the slippery steps.

“It is breakfast time,” he explained, as they emerged into the air.  “We leave each other alone for half an hour—­even the snipers.  But we must be careful.”  She followed in his footsteps, stooping so low that her hands could have touched the ground.  They had to be sure that they did not step off the narrow track marked with white stones, lest they should be drowned in the mud.  They passed the head of a dead horse.  It looked as if it had been cut off and laid there; the body was below it in the mud.

They spoke in whispers, and Joan at first had made an effort to disguise her voice.  But her conductor had smiled.  “They shall be called the brothers and the sisters of the Lord,” he had said.  “Mademoiselle is brave for her Brothers’ sake.”  He was a priest.  There were many priests among the stretcher-bearers.

Crouching close to the ground, behind the spreading roots of a giant oak, she raised her eyes.  Before her lay a sea of smooth, soft mud nearly a mile wide.  From the centre rose a solitary tree, from which all had been shot away but two bare branches like outstretched arms above the silence.  Beyond, the hills rose again.  There was something unearthly in the silence that seemed to brood above that sea of mud.  The old priest told her of the living men, French and German, who had stood there day and night sunk in it up to their waists, screaming hour after hour, and waving their arms, sinking into it lower and lower, none able to help them:  until at last only their screaming heads were left, and after a time these, too, would disappear:  and the silence come again.