ndreds of tiny interior
towns. D---- has never heard of the Red Cross, but D---- venerated, in
its thirteenth-century church, the Cross of Christ.

This is what happened:

One day in the first week of September a train drew up at the box-like
station, a heterogeneous train--coaches, luggage vans, cattle and
horse cars. The doors opened, and the work of emptying the cars began.
The women and children, aghast and bewildered, ran down the
sickle-handle road and watched. Four hundred wounded men were taken
out of the cars, laid prone on the station platform, and the train
went on.

There were no surgeons in D----, but there was a chemist who knew
something of medicine and who, for one reason or another, had not been
called to the ranks. There were no horses to draw carts. There was
nothing.

The chemist was a man of action. Very soon the sickle and the old
church saw a curious sight. They saw women and children, a procession,
pushing wounded men to the school in the hand carts that country
people use for milk cans and produce. They saw brawny peasant women
carrying chairs in which sat injured men with lolling heads and sunken
eyes.

Bales of straw were brought into the school. Tender, if unaccustomed,
hands washed fearful wounds, but there were no dressings, no bandages.

Any one who knows the French peasant and his poverty will realise the
plight of the little town. The peasant has no reserves of supplies.
Life is reduced to its simplest elements. There is nothing that is not
in use.

D---- solved part of its problem by giving up its own wooden beds to
the soldiers. It tore up its small stock of linen, its towels, its
dusters; but the problem of food remained.

There was a tiny stove, on which the three or four teachers of the
school had been accustomed to cook their midday meal. There was no
coal, only wood, and green wood at that. All day, and all day now,
D---- cooks the _pot-a-feu_ for the wounded on that tiny stove.
_Pot-a-feu_ is good diet for convalescents, but the "light diets" must
have eggs, broth, whatever can be found.

So the peasant woman of D---- comes to the hospital, bringing a few
eggs, the midday meal of her family, who will do without.

I have spoken mainly in the past tense, but conditions in D---- are
not greatly changed to-day. An old marquise, impoverished by the war,
darns the pathetic socks of the wounded men and mends their uniforms.
At the last report I received, the corridors and