Three Times and Out | Page 6

the middle one was a horrible one made by shrapnel.
He staggered painfully, poor chap, and his left eye was gone!
We passed a dead Canadian Highlander, whose kilt had pitched
forward when he fell, and seemed to be covering his face.
In the first village we came to, they halted us, and we saw it was a
dressing-station. The village was in ruins--even the town pump had had
its head blown off!--and broken glass, pieces of brick, and plaster
littered the one narrow street. The dressing was done in a two-room
building which may have been a store. The walls were discolored and
cracked, and the windows broken.
On a stretcher in the corner there lay a Canadian Highlander, from
whose wounds the blood dripped horribly and gathered in a red pool on
the dusty floor. His eyes were glazed and his face was drawn with pain.
He talked unceasingly, but without meaning. The only thing I
remember hearing him say was, "It's no use, mother--it's no use!"
Weller was attended to before I was, and marched on. While I sat there
on an old tin pail which I had turned up for this purpose, two German
officers came in, whistling. They looked for a minute at the dying
Highlander in the corner, and one of them went over to him. He saw at
once that his case was hopeless, and gave a short whistle as you do
when blowing away a thistledown, indicating that he would soon be
gone. I remember thinking that this was the German estimate of human
life.
He came to me and said, "Well, what have you got?"
I thought he referred to my wound, and said, "A shoulder wound." At

which he laughed pleasantly and said, "I am not interested in your
wound; that's the doctor's business." Then I saw what he meant; it was
souvenirs he was after. So I gave him my collar badge, and in return he
gave me a German coin, and went over to the doctor and said
something about me, for he flipped his finger toward me.
My turn came at last. The doctor examined my pay-book as well as my
wound. I had forty-five francs in it, and when he took it out, I thought it
was gone for sure. However, he carefully counted it before me, drawing
my attention to the amount, and then returned it to me.
After my wound had been examined and a tag put on me stating what
sort of treatment I was to have, I was taken away with half a dozen
others and led down a narrow stone stair to a basement. Here on the
cement floor were piles of straw, and the place was heated. The walls
were dirty and discolored. One of the few pleasant recollections of my
life in Germany has been the feeling of drowsy content that wrapped
me about when I lay down on a pile of straw in that dirty, rat-infested
basement. I forgot that I was a prisoner, that I was badly winged, that I
was hungry, thirsty, dirty, and tired. I forgot all about my wounded
companions and the Canadian Highlander, and all the suffering of the
world, and drifted sweetly out into the wide ocean of sleep.
Some time during the night--for it was still dark--I felt some one
kicking my feet and calling me to get up, and all my trouble and misery
came back with a rush. My shoulder began to ache just where it left off,
but I was so hungry that the thought of getting something to eat
sustained me. Surely, I thought, they are going to feed us!
We were herded along the narrow street, out into a wide road, where
we found an open car which ran on light rails in the centre of the road.
It was like the picnic trolley cars which run in our cities in the warm
weather. There were wounded German soldiers huddled together, and
we sat down among them, wherever we could find the room, but not a
word was spoken. I don't know whether they noticed who we were or
not--they had enough to think about, not to be concerned with us, for
most of them were terribly wounded. The one I sat beside leaned his
head against my good shoulder and sobbed as he breathed. I could not

help but think of the irony of war that had brought us together. For all I
knew, he may have been the machine gunner who had been the means
of ripping my shoulder to pieces--and it may have been a bullet from
my rifle which had torn its way along his leg which now hung useless.
Even so, there was no hard feeling between us, and he was welcome to