men who groan and who
cry aloud, who hurry frantically, crimsoned by fever or pallid and
visibly shaken by pain.

* * * * *

All this throng at last pulls up and gathers and groans at the
crossways where the burrows of the Refuge open out.

A doctor is trying with shouts and gesticulations to keep a little
space clear from the rising tide that beats upon the threshold of the
shelter, where he applies summary bandages in the open air; they say he
has not ceased to do it, nor his helpers either, all the night and all
the day, that he is accomplishing a superhuman task.

When they leave his hands, some of the wounded are swallowed up by the
black hole of the Refuge; others are sent back to the bigger
clearing-station contrived in the trench on the Bethune road.

In this confined cavity formed by the crossing of the ditches, in the
bottom of a sort of robbers' den, we waited two hours, buffeted,
squeezed, choked and blinded, climbing over each other like cattle, in
an odor of blood and butchery. There are faces that become more
distorted and emaciated from minute to minute. One of the patients can
no longer hold back his tears; they come in floods, and as he shakes
his head he sprinkles his neighbors. Another, bleeding like a fountain,
shouts, "Hey, there! have a look at me!" A young man with burning eyes
yells like a soul in hell, "I'm on fire!" and he roars and blows like a
furnace.

* * * * *

Joseph is bandaged. He thrusts a way through to me and holds out his
hand: "It isn't serious, it seems; good-by," he says.

At once we are separated in the mob. With my last glance I see his
wasted face and the vacant absorption in his trouble as he is meekly
led away by a Divisional stretcher-bearer whose hand is on his
shoulder; and suddenly I see him no more. In war, life separates us
just as death does, without our having even the time to think about it.

They tell me not to stay there, but to go down into the Refuge to rest
before returning. There are two entries, very low and very narrow, on
the level of the ground. This one is flush with the mouth of a sloping
gallery, narrow as the conduit of a sewer. In order to penetrate the
Refuge, one must first turn round and work backwards with bent body
into the shrunken pipe, and here the feet discover steps. Every three
paces there is a deep step.

Once inside you have a first impression of being trapped--that there is