So then we knew that under the gilding of the Gilded Youth was fine gold.  He was called for a wounded man.  As he cranked up his car he asked rather too casually, “Have you seen our friend from the boat—­the pretty nurse?” We started to answer; the stretcher bearer called again and in an instant he went buzzing away and we returned to the hospital.

We slept that night in a hospital bed.  The week before three thousand men had passed through that hospital—­some upon the long journey, so we rose early the next morning.  For some way to Henry and me there seemed a curious disquietude about those hospital beds.

In the early morning just after dawn we saw them taking out the dead from the hospital.  The stretcher bearers moved as quickly as they could with their burden through the yard.  A dozen soldiers and orderlies were in the hospital compound, but no one turned a head toward the bearers and their burden.  There were indeed, in sad deed, “a dearth of woman’s nursing and a lack of woman’s tears.”  No one knew who the dead man was.  He wore his identification tag about him.  No one cared except that it should be registered.  If he was an officer he went to one part of the little graveyard just outside the fence; if he was a private he went inside.  It was a lonely, heart-breaking sight.  And it occurred to Henry and me—­we had been among the ghosts on the hill the night before and had slept uneasily with the ghosts in the hospital—­that we should give one poor fellow a funeral.  So we lined up in the chill dawn, and followed the stretcher bearers and marched after some poor Frenchman to his tomb.  It was probably the only funeral that the hospital yard ever had seen, for the soldiers and orderlies and attendants turned and gaped at the wonder, and nurses peered from the windows.

Four days later we were sitting in the courtyard of a little tavern in St. Dizier.  A young French soldier came up, and tried his English on us.  He found that we had been to Verdun.  And he asked, “Have you heard the news from the big base hospital?” We had not.  Then he told us that the night before the German airmen had come to the hospital early in the night and had dropped their eggs—­incendiary bombs.  An hour later they came and dropped some high explosives.  They came again at midnight and because there were no anti-aircraft guns near by—­the allies until those August and September German raids never had dreamed that hospitals would be raided—­they came again swooping low and turned their machine guns on the doctors and the nurses in the compound who were taking the wounded out of the burning building.  Then toward morning they came and dropped handbills which declared, “If you don’t want your hospitals bombed, move them back further from the front!”

The Germans were not acting in the heat of passion.  They were fighting scientifically, even if barbarously.  For every mile a hospital is moved back of the line makes it that much harder to stop gangrene in the wounded.  And by checking gangrene we are saving a great majority of our wounded to return to battle.