mplaint, often without even a word to express the horrid pain, unless
I had seen it. Amid all that battered, bleeding, shattered flesh and
bone, the human spirit showed itself a very splendid thing that night.
The reception room at last filled to overflowing and could not be
emptied. All the wards and lofts and tents were crammed. By the time the
other station was filled the two had taken in three thousand men. They
remained with us for a week, because the hospital trains were too busy
behind Loos to come our way. Every day every man had to have his wounds
dressed. Some were covered with wounds; many of the wounds were
dangerous, all were painful; and gas gangrene, which the surgeon so
hates to see, had to be fought again and again. The medical staff, seven
in number, worked on day after day, and night after night, skilfully,
tenderly, ruthlessly. There were also a great many operations, and
scores of difficult critical decisions.

As we stepped out from among the blanketed forms I thought bitterly of
the 'glory' of war. Yet if there was any glory in war this was it. It
was here, in this patient suffering and obedience. These men might well
glory in their infirmities. This was heroism, the real thing, the spirit
rising to incredible heights of patient endurance in the foreseen
possible result of positive action for an ideal. The reaction from
battle is overwhelming. Passions that the civilised man simply does not
know, so colourless is his experience of them in ordinary days, are let
loose, anger and terror and horror and lust to kill. So for a while, as
nearly always happens, even wounds lost their power to pain in the
sleep of bottomless exhaustion. Those who could not sleep were drugged
with morphine. The moaning never stopped, but rose and fell and rose
again. It shook my heart. We turned from the ashen faces and went out
into the grey morning light. Everything seemed very grey. A mist was
drawing up slowly from the sluggish Lys, and we wondered as we went
shivering through it across the soaked grass what was happening beyond
it over there at Loos.

Next afternoon at tea we were all cheered by the news that a man who had
had his leg taken off three hours before was asking for a penny whistle.
At last it was discovered that one of the cooks had one. (Cooks in the
army are a race apart, possessors of all kinds of strange
accomplishments.) It was willingly handed over, and soon the strains of
'Annie Laurie' were risin