et; I only know that there is no trouble.
Here were empty trucks, speeding back for new loads. And some there
were that carried all sorts of wreckage--the flotsam and jetsam cast
up on the safe shores behind the front by the red tide of war.
Nothing is thrown away out there; nothing is wasted. Great piles of
discarded shoes are brought back to be made over. They are as good as
new when they come back from the factories where they are worked
over. Indeed, the men told me they were better than new, because they
were less trying to their feet, and did not need so much breaking in.

Men go about, behind the front, and after a battle, picking up
everything that has been thrown away. Everything is sorted and gone
over with the utmost care. Rifles that have been thrown away or
dropped when men were wounded or killed, bits of uniforms, bayonets--
everything is saved. Reclamation is the order of the day. There is
waste enough in war that cannot be avoided; the British army sees to
it that there is none that is avoidable.

But it was not only that sort of wreckage, that sort of driftwood
that was being carried back to be made over. Presently we began to
see great motor ambulances coming along, each with a Red Cross
painted glaringly on its side--though that paint was wasted or worse,
for there is no target the Hun loves better, it would seem, than the
great red cross of mercy. And in them, as we knew, there was the most
pitiful wreckage of all--the human wreckage of the war.

In the wee sma' hours of the morn they bear the men back who have
been hit the day before and during the night. They go back to the
field dressing stations and the hospitals just behind the front, to
be sorted like the other wreckage. Some there are who cannot be moved
further, at first, but must he cared for under fire, lest they die on
the way. But all whose wounds are such that they can safely be moved
go back in the ambulances, first to the great base hospitals, and
then, when possible, on the hospital ships to England.

Sometimes, but not often, we passed troops marching along the road.
They swung along. They marched easily, with the stride that could
carry them furthest with the least effort. They did not look much
like the troops I used to see in London. They did not have the snap
of the Coldstream Guards, marching through Green Park in the old
days. But they looked like business and like war. They looked like
men who had a job of work to do and m