ue cambric, waving mysteriously in
the night wind, were supposed to hide even this glimmer from the eyes of
raiding Zeppelins. Looking down, early in the evening, into the great
quadrangle of the institution, one saw the windows of the opposite wing
veiled with this mysterious blue, and heard all the feverish unrest of a
hospital, the steps on the tiled corridors, the running of water in the
bathroom taps, the hard clatter of surgical vessels, and sometimes the
cry of a patient having a painful wound dressed. But late at night the
confused murmur of the battle between life and death had subsided, the
lights in the wards were extinguished, and only the candle of the night
nurse, seen behind a screen, and the stertorous breathing of the many
sleepers, brought back the consciousness of human life. I have often
looked into the wards as I returned from night calls to the station
where we received the wounded, and been conscious, as I peered silently
into that flickering obscurity, of the vague unrest of sleepers, of the
various attitudes assumed, the arms outstretched, the upturned throats,
and felt, too, in the still room, the mystic presence of the Angel of
Pain.

It was late at night, and I stood looking out of my window over the
roofs of Neuilly to the great, darkened city just beyond. From somewhere
along the tracks of the "Little Belt" railway came a series of piercing
shrieks from a locomotive whistle. It was raining hard, drumming on the
slate roof of the dormitory, and somewhere below a gutter gurgled
foolishly. Far away in the corridor a gleam of yellow light shone from
the open door of an isolation room where a nurse was watching by a
patient dying of gangrene. Two comrades who had been to the movies at
the Gaumont Palace near the Place Clichy began to talk in sibilant
whispers of the evening's entertainment, and one of them said, "That war
film was a corker; did you spot the big cuss throwing the grenades?"
"Yuh, damn good," answered the other pulling his shirt over his head. It
was a strange crew that inhabited these quarters; there were idealists,
dreamers, men out of work, simple rascals and adventurers of all kinds.
To my right slept a big, young Westerner, from some totally unknown
college in Idaho, who was a humanitarian enthusiast to the point of
imbecility, and to the left a middle-aged rogue who indulged in secret
debauches of alcohol and water he cajoled from the hospital orderlies.
Yet this obscure and