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Updated: June 8, 2025
The dead and the living lay side by side, though such of the wounded as could be reached were dragged back to dressing-stations on the river-banks. Even here they were not safe, for the dense foliage that afforded a grateful shade also concealed scores of Spanish sharp-shooters.
I suppose that was another delusion, that riding down of a flying foe by horsemen. But it was not only the stretcher-bearers who clung to it. We saw our friends no more after they disappeared into the smoking furnace of the front. They were scattered here and there among the dressing-stations in the fighting area.
Then I told him of my experience. "You may be right." And so it is all over France; where I have worked in some twenty hospitals from the first-aid dressing-stations back through the evacuation hospitals to the base hospitals and have found that the reaction of our boys to wounds and suffering is always a spiritual reaction.
I know you are the person for it, and you will be prompt and interested. The wounded are suffering from hunger as much as from their wounds. In most places, such as dressing-stations and railway-stations, nothing is provided for them at all, and many men are left for two or three days without food. I wish I could describe it all to you!
There came a time when the camp changed and many old friends disappeared. At the beginning of the Somme battle there was a sudden demand for stretcher-bearers to serve at the advanced dressing-stations. Almost every day we were bidden to send men. Little parties assembled on the parade ground and marched off to entrain for the front.
On the way we stop at an air-station, to watch the aeroplanes rising and coming down, and at a point near Poperinghe we go over a casualty-clearing station a collection of hospital huts, with storehouses and staff quarters with the medical officer in charge. Here were women nurses who are not allowed in the field dressing-stations nearer the line.
Worse even than the sight of dead men were the groans and entreaties of those lying wounded in the trenches waiting to be taken back to the dressing-stations. "I'm shot through the stomach, matey! Can't you get me back to the ambulance? Ain't they some way you can get me back out o' this?" "Stick it, old lad! You won't 'ave long to wite. They'll be some of the Red Cross along 'ere in a jiffy now."
By the end of our first week Jimmy seemed to get used to being followed as a matter of course. We had followed him to Alost and Termonde and Quatrecht and Zele. When we weren't following him we were near him somewhere, working at the dressing-stations or among the refugees. Then he did a mean thing. He managed to get himself sent to Antwerp for three days.
More weariness bends our spines again, more obscurity hums in our heads. By following the bed of a valley, we have found trenches again, and then men. These splayed and squelched alleys, with their fat and sinking sandbags, their props which rot like limbs, flow into wider pockets where activity prevails battalion H.Q., or dressing-stations.
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