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As I came to the door, the heart of the procession went by. A group of brancardiers formed an irregular square, holding cords to keep back the crowd; and in the middle walked a group of three, followed by an empty litter. The three were a white-haired man on this side, a stalwart brancardier on the other, and between them a girl with a radiant face, singing with all her heart.
The brancardiers repeated the same comments after every explosion. I thought: "They have been saying this to each other for over three years. It has become automatic. They will never be able to stop." I was feverish, perhaps. If it was fever, it burned away any illusions I may have had of modern warfare from the infantryman's viewpoint.
When the brancardiers picked him up, he had just strength to point to this address. Before they could carry him there he was dead. But the most painful scene during the battle was the sight of a French soldier who fell by French balls. He was a private in the 119th Battalion, and refused to advance. His commander remonstrated. The private shot him.
The miraculés came first with their banners file after file of them then a number of prelates, then brancardiers with their shoulder-harness, then nuns, then more brancardiers.
There a child tossed and moaned and turned away his head. There an old man crouched forward upon his litter, held up on either side by two men in the uniform of the brancardiers. . . . And so, in endless lines, they lay; from every nation under heaven: Chinese were there, he saw, and negroes; and the very air in which he walked seemed alight with pain and longing.
Our rapid turnover of patients involved a large amount of manual labour in stretcher work, clearing up wards, and so on, but all this was done for us by our brancardiers, or stretcher-bearers. These were Belgians who for one reason or another could not serve with the army, and who were therefore utilized by the Government for purposes such as these.
In the end they gave up Mr. Brockville for lost and came home with the ambulances. But he turned up in the middle of the night, to everyone's huge delight. 23 October. A crisp autumn morning, a courtyard filled with motors and brancardiers and men in uniform, and women in knickerbockers and puttees, all lighting cigarettes and talking about repairs and gears and a box of bandages.
Those two brancardiers are coming for the second man. When they start up the steps with him, you pop into the back of the ambulance." "Why, Charlie!" she murmured in utter amazement. "Are you going to do as you are told?" he demanded with much apparent fierceness. "But the third man? You have another wounded man inside." The stretcher-bearers slid the second convalescent out of the ambulance.
Between the fort and the gate there were several hundred ambulance waggons, and above a thousand "brancardiers," stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers to keep themselves warm. In the fields on each side of the road there were numerous regiments of Mobiles drawn up ready to advance if required.
It affects those to whom one speaks the quiet doctors, even those who, through some confusion of mind or some sin, find it hard to believe; the strong brancardiers, who carry their quivering burdens with such infinite care; the very sick themselves, coming back from the piscines in agony, yet with the faces of those who come down from the altar after Holy Communion.
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