I
went in.
One of the men was shot through the spine and paralysed. The second
one had a bullet in his neck, and his face already bore the dark flush
and anxious look of general infection. The boy smiled.
They had been there since the day before, waiting for a locomotive to
come and move the hospital train that waited outside. In that railway
station the boy had had his leg taken off at the knee.
They lay there, quite alone. The few women were feeding starving men.
Now and then one would look in to see if there was any change. There
was nothing to be done. They lay there, and the shells burst
incessantly a mile away, and the men in the next room laughed and
applauded at some happy stroke of the young artist.
"I am so sorry," I said to the boy. The others had not roused at my
entrance, but he had looked at me with quick, intelligent eyes.
"It is nothing!" was his reply.
Outside, in the village, soldiers thronged the streets. The sun was
shining with the first promise of spring. In an area way regimental
butchering was going on, and a great sow, escaping, ran frenzied down
the street, followed by a throng of laughing, shouting men. And still
the shells fell, across a few fields, and inside the station the three
men lay and waited.
That evening at dusk the bombardment ceased, and I went through the
shelled town.
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