Casualty clearing stations are very frequent indeed in these advanced posts. With a curious appearance of contradictoriness, their marquees are streaked and splashed against aircraft, but here and there bear an enormous Red Cross glaring an appeal at the heavens. The language of all this is: "We're hospital, and you know it from these outward and visible signs. But if you're going to be frightful, we'll make it as hard as we can for you to hit." ... Over the road is the burial-ground, significantly full.
Mostly these hospitals are on a railway-line. Some are not. From the latter the stream of motor-ambulances is continuous at certain seasons. There are Sisters in these advanced stations; they are little more than dressing stations, and more than seldom they are shelled. It's no joke for women; they do not blench. There have been "honours and rewards" made them for continuing to dress cases when suffering wounds themselves.
And who shall describe the strafings suffered by some of the advanced railheads? Shelling of clearing stations may be more or less accidental, but railheads are good game and are shelled very deliberately and very thoroughly. I visited one afternoon a railhead supply depôt that had been shelled from five to nine that morning. The havoc was good ground for self-congratulation by the enemy batteries that caused it. Nine-inch shell for four hours, if well observed by those who deliver it, can do great things. There were shell-holes all over the station yard—lines ripped up, trucks blown to splinters, supply stacks scattered to the fields, petrol dump smouldering, station-house battered. This is horribly disorganising. Only one thing is worse, of that kind: the strafing of a railway junction by bombs. This is obstructive, and isolating almost beyond retrieve.
The villages about such stations suffer seriously. They bear the marks about the house walls. Villages adjacent to batteries—apart from railheads—get it even worse. Generally they lie behind a wood which conceals our heavy artillery.
At any junction along a military road you are impressed by the usefulness of the military police. They stand there directing the traffic by pantomime, just as in London. Their word is law from which there is no appeal. If a driver grows argumentative it is always the worse for him. District A.P.M.'s will allow no dispute of the directions of their minions. You must wait for their instructions and obey them very exactly. If they tell you to wait you dare not budge; if you do, there's your number glaring on your bonnet, and your goose is cooked. The military police are all-powerful on the road, and proportionately autocratic. A sergeant will step into a stretch of clear rural road and address the driver: "What limit is on your speed?"—"Six miles."—"My instructions to you are to go much slower."—"Why" (irritably), "what am I going now?"—"Never mind that" (with a conclusive gesture); "I've timed you from the last post, and you're too fast. I'm not making a case of it, but you go slower. Hear?" And this monument of British administrative exactitude walks off, after saluting perfunctorily (he gives you no loophole), and throws you permission to go on and behave.
You proceed, with the guns belching over the ridge, the observation balloons overhanging the slope silently spotting and sending down cool and deadly mathematical messages. The 'planes drone above; the multitudinous machinery of war creaks and rumbles down the road; the landscape lies around you incongruously quiet and lovely.
CHAPTER II
BEHIND THE LINES—II