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McAllister, who severely reprimanded Lieutenant Cox, and excused me from future attendance upon that ward. I have said that Charlie Gazzan was a special patient and friend; perhaps the expression needs explanation. A few weeks before, he had been brought to me one night from the ambulance-train, a living skeleton, and seemingly at the point of death from dysentery.
We prepared the men as well as we could for the long ride in the wagons that must precede the still longer train journey. Once on the ambulance-train, however, they would be well looked after; it was the jolting on the country road I feared for many of them.
The upsetness was so complete that it almost seemed to me an actual fulfilment of a mysterious prophecy or warning often uttered by old negroes to terrorize children into good behavior: "Better mind out dar: fust thing you knows you ain't gwine ter know nuffin'." Everything seemed to be going on at once. The ambulance-train, with a few baggage-cars attached, was even then at the depot.
An ambulance-train arrived one night, bringing an unusually large number of sick and wounded men, whose piteous moans filled the air as they were brought up the hill on "stretchers" or alighted at the door of the hospital from ambulances, which, jolting over the rough, country road, had tortured them inexpressibly.
In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more mangled men lay on their stretchers, hobbled to the ambulance-trains, groped blindly with one hand clutching at a comrade's arm. More, and more, and more, with head wounds, and body wounds, with trench-feet, and gas. "O Christ!" said one of them whom I knew. He had been laid on a swing-bed in the ambulance-train.
The 15th Division had proved its quality. Their old battalions, famous in history, had gained new honor. Thousands of those lightly wounded men swarmed about a long ambulance-train standing in a field near the village of Choques. They crowded the carriages, leaned out of the windows with their bandaged heads and arms, shouting at friends they saw in the other crowds.
I have been upon an ambulance-train freighted with human agony delayed for hours by rumors of an enemy in ambush. I have fed men hungry with the ravening hunger of the wounded with scanty rations of musty corn-bread; have seen them drink eagerly of foetid water, dipped from the road-side ditches.
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