We entered the school house and turning into the classroom on the left, I saw twelve cots made of rough boards and twelve wan, unshaven men who lay there as men dead, although, at the sound of our approach, their eyes turned in a disinterested stare. I observed a German, who seemed to tremble under the covers, and as I walked beside his bed, I saw that the sweat was standing out on his face.
"How high is his fever?" I asked the surgeon.
"He has no fever. He is sweating with pain."
I turned to go out. I think the surgeon was offended that I did not make the rounds with him, for, with true German consideration and thoroughness, it was doubtless his plan to show me every detail of his little hospital.
"Eight weeks ago," he was saying, as I walked back towards the door, "we had two hundred wounded in here—but now," and his tone was almost apologetic.
I asked him how far the wounded had to be transported from here before they could be placed in a hospital train.
"Thirty-five kilometers," he said; "that is to Cambrai," and he was explaining something about his interesting cases, and doubtless wondering why I did not write them down in the memorandum that stuck from my pocket. Two weeks before I would have done so, but as you come to see the wounded in this war, you feel—rightly or wrongly; I do not know—that it is the grossest banalism to draw a notebook before the eyes of the wounded and write of their sufferings. Unthinking, I did it once in the hospital at Gleiwitz, and I shall never forget the look in a dying Austrian's eyes.
Close by the door, I noticed a black-bearded Frenchman, his leg heavily bandaged, and over his head on the schoolroom wall hung a cheap copy of an etching of Friedland with the victorious French cuirassiers galloping by. What a world of sadness looked out from that wounded Frenchman's eyes. As we walked out into the court, you could hear the cannon more plainly, a steady crashing seeming ever to grow in violence as though one new battery after another was being unlimbered to make work for the surgeons in little school houses the countryside round. In great indignation, the surgeon drew a fragment of metal from his pocket and explained that two days ago an English aviator had dropped the bomb of which that was a part, only eighty meters from the hospital. But I scarcely heard him. From the manure-strewn courtyard across the street floated a cheer. Had the Saxonians been told they were to be sent to the trenches? And I wondered if this was to be their deliverance—the beds of unpainted wood, where I had seen a man sweat with pain.