The War on All Fronts: Englands Effort | Page 6

thousand separate parts are now dealt with, stored, and arranged in this same depot. The Sunday morning began with a simple service in the Young Men's Christian Association hut, at which five hundred motor-drivers attended, about half of the whole number in the station.
The same day they explored endless camps and the wards of a Red Cross hospital. It was impossible to take in everything at once, and our ladies retired at night, bewildered by mingled impressions of "human energy, human intelligence, human suffering," but full of pride and exultation at the efficiency of their country and of the good relations of their soldiers with the French. They carried with them as a last impression of the day the picture of a canteen worked day and night in three shifts by a heroic band of women close by the railway station, full of soldiers just departing for the front, young, gay and full of spirits; then came the train to take the soldiers off for the fighting line, and the women, left behind, set up the song, already familiar in the Midlands, "Keep the home fires burning till the boys come home."
In the village where they stopped, some forty miles from the actual front, a special messenger from the general headquarters brings the amazing news that General Headquarters invites Mrs. Ward and her daughter for two days, and will send a motor for them, if they accept, which, of course, they did upon the instant, looking forward with eagerness to the great mysteries of the front, its camps, its men, and its hospitals, that they were to see with their own eyes to-morrow.
The remainder of the day before they are to start for the front suffices for the visit to a camp set down in one of the pleasantest spots in France, a favorite haunt of French artists before the war, now occupied by a British reinforcement camp, the trees having all been cut away, by long lines of hospitals, by a convalescent depot, and by the training grounds, to which we have already referred.
I must copy the bare catalogue of what this vast camp contained: "Sleeping and mess quarters for those belonging to the new armies; sixteen hospitals with twenty-one thousand beds" (and this shows now what it was to be near the front); "rifle ranges; training camps; a vast laundry, worked by French women under British organization, which washes for all the hospitals thirty thousand pieces a day; recreation huts of every possible kind; a cinema theatre seating eight hundred men, with performances twice a day; nurses clubs; officers clubs; a supply depot for food; an ordnance depot for everything that is not food; railroad sidings on which every kind of man and thing can go out and come in without interruption; a convalescents' depot of two thousand patients; and a convalescent horse depot of two thousand horses; all this in one camp, established since last April."
Ah! But the deepest impression left on the minds of our ladies is of the terrible sufferings in the hospitals, of the smiling endurance with which they were borne, of the timely skill, pity, and devotion of the doctors and nurses, taking care of the twenty thousand wounded. Realizing the sympathy of America with all these scenes and sufferings, they do not fail to note the hospitals organized by the Universities of Chicago and of Harvard, staffed by American sisters and doctors, each providing thirty-four doctors and eighty nurses, and dealing with a thousand patients, and a convalescent depot of two thousand beds. Every day the ambulance train comes in, and splendid hospital ships are taking the brave wounded back to England for home and rest.
And now came the day in which they were to motor forty miles to be the guests of the G.H.Q. Soon they seemed to be in the midst of the battle, "our own guns were thundering away behind us, and the road was more and more broken up by shell holes." The British lines are just beyond, cottages close by, and the German lines just in front of a wood near them, three-quarters of a mile away. Already they had been nearer than any woman, even a nurse, had been in this war, to the actual fighting on the English line, and the cup of impressions was full. They actually saw the brave boys whom they had passed an hour before, sitting in the fields waiting for orders, now marching into the trenches to take their turn there--they knew that they were marching into the jaws of death, but they walked as quietly and as cheerfully as if they were going to a parade, the guns crashing close by them all the time. The firing being too hot for the women, the captain in charge of them