other, to the Quarter-master's
stores, to the kitchen, to the wash-houses, to twenty other points in
the great camp to which orders must go, and from which messages must
return. The bugler stood in the verandah outside the orderly room,
ready to blow his calls or strike the hours with a hammer on a suspended
length of railway line. At the entrance gate, standing sharply to
attention as a guardsman should, even under a blazing sun, was Private
Malley, of the Irish Guards, wounded long ago, now wearing the brassard
of the Military Police. He saw to it that no person unauthorized entered
the camp. Above him, limp from its staff, hung the Red Cross flag,
unrecognizable that day, since there was no faintest breeze to stir its
folds.

Close by the flag staff is the little dressing station. Here the men in
the camp, men discharged from hospital, are seen by the doctors and
the period of their rest and convalescence is decided. They are marked
"Fit," and go to the fighting again, or sent back and enjoy good
quarters and pleasant food for a while longer. Or--best hope--marked
"Blighty" and go home. This is the routine. But sometimes there is a
difference. There had been a difference every day since the "Big Push"
started. Outside the dressing station was a group of forty or fifty
men. They lay on the ground, most of them sound asleep. They lay in the
strangest attitudes, curled up, some of them; others with arms and legs
flung wide, the attitudes of men utterly exhausted, whose overpowering
need is rest. Some sat huddled up, too tired to sleep, blinking their
eyes in the strong sunshine. Most of these men wore bandages. Bandages
were on their heads, their hands, their arms and legs, where sleeves and
trousers had been cut away. Some of them had lost their caps. One
here and there had lost a boot. Many of them wore tattered tunics and
trousers with long rents in them. All of them were covered with mud, mud
that had dried into hard yellow cakes. These were men sent straight down
from the field dressing stations, men who had been slightly wounded, so
slightly that there was no need for them to go to hospital. Among them
there was one man who neither lay huddled nor sprawled. He sat upright,
his knees drawn up to his chest, held tight in his clasped hands. He
stared straight in front of him with wide, unblinking eyes. Of all the
men in the group, he was the muddiest His clothes were caked with mud.
His face was covered with mud. His