We entered a muddy
courtyard through a gate, and the building loomed before us. It had
been a girls' convent school, and was now a military hospital for both
the French and British armies, one half the building being used by
each. It was the first war hospital I had seen, and I was taken
through the building by Major S----, of the Royal Army Medical Corps.
It was morning, and the corridors and stairs still bore the mud of the
night, when the ambulances drive into the courtyard and the stretchers
are carried up the stairs. It had been rather a quiet night, said
Major S----. The operations were already over, and now the work of
cleaning up was going on.
He opened a door, and we entered a long ward.
I live in a great manufacturing city. Day by day its mills take their
toll in crushed bodies. The sight of broken humanity is not new to me.
In a general way, it is the price we pay for prosperity. Individually,
men so injured are the losers in life's great struggle for food and
shelter.
I had never before seen men dying of an ideal.
There is a terrible sameness in war hospitals. There are rows of beds,
and in them rows of unshaven, white-faced men. Some of them turn and
look at visitors. Others lie very still, with their eyes fixed on the
ceiling, or eternity, or God knows what.
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