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Outside a square brick building, which was the Town Hall of Lillers, and for a time a casualty clearing-station, the "bad" cases were unloaded; men with chunks of steel in their lungs and bowels were vomiting great gobs of blood, men with arms and legs torn from their trunks, men without noses, and their brains throbbing through opened scalps, men without faces...
When at last my turn came at this dressing-station they just gave me an injection to prevent poisoning and sent me on. After much jolting in a motor ambulance I arrived at a big clearing-station and had my leg properly dressed. Then they put me aboard a Red Cross train, and I was lying there feeling pretty tough when a sweet voice said, "Would you like a cigarette?"
If there had been a ray, a possibility of hope, every resource of science would have been brought to bear on saving him, there in that casualty clearing-station, itself a large hospital, where the Squire had found him.
The wounded men sat or lay on the grass outside waiting for their turns to go in. They wore the tattered, mud-caked clothes of the battlefield. The bandages of the casualty clearing-station were round their limbs and heads. Some were utterly exhausted. They lay down. They pillowed their heads on their arms and sank into heavy slumber.
Perhaps after the war is ended, when it is too late, some one may invent a motor ambulance on easy springs that will not multiply unnecessarily the pain of torn flesh and the grating edges of bones. Now comes the night in the casualty clearing-station at Heilly. Straight on to another operating-table, but one in a sea of many ten operations going on at once.
Poor soul! he is weary of giving his "particulars." He has had to give them half-a-dozen times at least, perhaps more, since he left the front. At the field dressing-station they wanted his particulars, at the clearing-station, on the train, at the base hospital, on another train, on the steamer, on the next train, and now in this English hospital.
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