Kings, Queens, and Pawns | Page 7

to see many similar scenes, much more of the flotsam and jetsam of the human tide that was sweeping back and forward over the flat fields of France and Flanders.
A hospital train had come in, a British train. The twilight had deepened into night. Under the flickering arc lamps, in that cold and dismal place, the train came to a quiet stop. Almost immediately it began to unload. A door opened and a British nurse alighted. Then slowly and painfully a man in a sitting position slid forward, pushing himself with his hands, his two bandaged feet held in the air. He sat at the edge of the doorway and lowered his feet carefully until they hung free.
"Frozen feet from the trenches," said a man standing beside me.
The first man was lifted down and placed on a truck, and his place was filled immediately by another. As fast as one man was taken another came. The line seemed endless. One and all, their faces expressed keen apprehension, lest some chance awkwardness should touch or jar the tortured feet. Ten at a time they were wheeled away. And still they came and came, until perhaps two hundred had been taken off. But now something else was happening. Another car of badly wounded was being unloaded. Through the windows could be seen the iron framework on which the stretchers, three in a tier, were swung.
Halfway down the car a wide window was opened, and two tall lieutenants, with four orderlies, took their places outside. It was very silent. Orders were given in low tones. The muffled rumble of the trucks carrying the soldiers with frozen feet was all that broke the quiet, and soon they, too, were gone; and there remained only the six men outside, receiving with hands as gentle as those of women the stretchers so cautiously worked over the window sill to them. One by one the stretchers came; one by one they were added to the lengthening line that lay prone on the stone flooring beside the train. There was not a jar, not an unnecessary motion. One great officer, very young, took the weight of the end as it came toward him, and lowered it with marvellous gentleness as the others took hold. He had a trick of the wrist that enabled him to reach up, take hold and lower the stretcher, without freeing his hands. He was marvellously strong, marvellously tender.
The stretchers were laid out side by side. Their occupants did not speak or move. It was as if they had reached their limit of endurance. They lay with closed eyes, or with impassive, upturned faces, swathed in their brown blankets against the chill. Here and there a knitted neck scarf had been loosely wrapped about a head. All over America women were knitting just such scarfs.
And still the line grew. The car seemed inexhaustible of horrors. And still the young lieutenant with the tender hands and the strong wrists took the onus of the burden, the muscles of his back swelling under his khaki tunic. If I were asked to typify the attitude of the British Army and of the British people toward their wounded, I should point to that boy. Nothing that I know of in history can equal the care the English are taking of their wounded in this, the great war. They have, of course, the advantage of the best nursing system in Europe.
France is doing her best, but her nursing had always been in the hands of nuns, and there are not nearly enough nuns in France to-day to cope with the situation. Belgium, with some of the greatest surgeons in the world, had no organised nursing system when war broke out. She is largely dependent apparently on the notable work of her priests, and on English and Dutch nurses.
When my train drew out, the khaki-clad lieutenant and his assistants were still at work. One car was emptied. They moved on to a second. Other willing hands were at work on the line that stretched along the stone flooring, carrying the wounded to ambulances, but the line seemed hardly to shrink. Always the workers inside the train brought another stretcher and yet another. The rumble of the trucks had ceased. It was very cold. I could not look any longer.
It took three hours to go the twenty miles to Calais, from six o'clock to nine. I wrapped myself in my fur coat. Two men in my compartment slept comfortably. One clutched a lighted cigarette. It burned down close to his fingers. It was fascinating to watch. But just when it should have provided a little excitement he wakened. It was disappointing.
We drifted into conversation, the gentleman of the cigarette and I. He was an Englishman from a London newspaper. He was