This is what happened:
One day in the first week of September a train drew up at the box-like
station, a heterogeneous train--coaches, luggage vans, cattle and
horse cars. The doors opened, and the work of emptying the cars began.
The women and children, aghast and bewildered, ran down the
sickle-handle road and watched. Four hundred wounded men were taken
out of the cars, laid prone on the station platform, and the train
went on.
There were no surgeons in D----, but there was a chemist who knew
something of medicine and who, for one reason or another, had not been
called to the ranks. There were no horses to draw carts. There was
nothing.
The chemist was a man of action. Very soon the sickle and the old
church saw a curious sight. They saw women and children, a procession,
pushing wounded men to the school in the hand carts that country
people use for milk cans and produce. They saw brawny peasant women
carrying chairs in which sat injured men with lolling heads and sunken
eyes.
Bales of straw were brought into the school. Tender, if unaccustomed,
hands washed fearful wounds, but there were no dressings, no bandages.
Any one who knows the French peasant and his poverty will realise the
plight of the little town. The peasant has no reserves of supplies.
Life is reduced to its simplest elements.
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