antry fire is
only that of "snipers." But over the trench and over the line of
communication behind the trench hang always the enemy's "starlights."

The ambulances come up. They cannot come as far as the trenches, but
stretchers are brought and the wounded men are lifted out as tenderly
as possible.

Many soldiers have tried to tell of the horrors of a night journey in
an ambulance or transport; careful driving is out of the question.
Near the front the ambulance can have no lights, and the roads
everywhere have been torn up by shells.

Men die in transit, and, dying, hark back to early days. They call for
their mothers, for their wives. They dictate messages that no one can
take down. Unloaded at railway stations, the dead are separated from
the living and piled in tiers on trucks. The wounded lie about on
stretchers on the station floor. Sometimes they are operated on there,
by the light of a candle, it may be, or of a smoking lamp. When it is
a well-equipped station there is the mercy of chloroform, the blessed
release of morphia, but more times than I care to think of at night,
there has been no chloroform and no morphia.

France has sixty hospital trains, England twelve, Belgium not so many.

I have seen trains drawing in with their burden of wounded men. They
travel slowly, come to a gradual stop, without jolting or jarring; but
instead of the rush of passengers to alight, which usually follows the
arrival of a train, there is silence, infinite quiet. Then, somewhere,
a door is unhurriedly opened. Maybe a priest alights and looks about
him. Perhaps it is a nurse who steps down and takes a comprehensive
survey of conditions. There is no talking, no uproar. A few men may
come up to assist in lifting out the stretchers, an ambulance driver
who salutes and indicates with a gesture where his car is stationed.
There are no onlookers. This is business, the grim business of war.
The line of stretchers on the station platform grows. The men lie on
them, impassive. They have waited so long. They have lain on the
battlefield, in the trench, behind the line at the dressing shed,
waiting, always waiting. What is a little time more or less, now?

The patience of the injured! I have been in many hospitals. I have
seen pneumonia and typhoid patients lying in the fearful apathy of
disease. They are very sad to see, very tragic, but their patience is
the lethargy of half consciousness. Their fixed eyes see visions. The
pati