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So rapidly did the men fall that accommodation could not possibly be found for them. They lay about anywhere. The space between the bed-cots was full of groaning, struggling, dying humanity. In inches of mud and slush they lay, breathing their lives out all unattended. The supply of doctors, nurses, and orderlies was altogether inadequate.
Barrack rooms everywhere overcrowded, men sleeping by the side of the bed-cots as well as upon them; every available space utilised; even the H Block Soldiers' Home turned outside into a tent, that the rooms it occupied might be used as temporary barrack rooms again. Discipline was necessarily somewhat relaxed! Drunkenness all too rife!
To be all day and half the night visiting the sick and dying where there are no comforts, very little food, and the medicine has run short; to see that hospital steadily grow, men on the bed-cots, men lying between them; to watch men struggling in the agonies of the disease, with dying men close beside them; to have to step over one prostrate figure to get to the side of some dying man and whisper words of comfort and prayer, while shrieks of agony come from either side; to feel weary, becoming gradually weaker through want of food, to know that ere long one's own turn would come, and the inexorable disease would claim its victim; to go through the same daily round of loathsome duty, and find in it one's highest privilege; to endure, to suffer, to dare, to sympathise, to soothe, to help; evening by evening to listen to the last requests of dying men, and morning by morning to lay them in their hastily dug graves all this requires heroism compared with which the heroism of battle pales into insignificance.
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