During the long night, as we hurried from patient to patient in the darkened cry-haunted ward, covering the restless sleeping figures, moving them into more comfortable positions, with a prayer for each one's mother, I could screw up no feeling of resentment towards the dying Saxon boy, in spite of the cries of our men, but only against that vile Prussianism that brought up its children to regard rapine and slaughter as a divine necessity. By midnight things were quiet enough to allow us to cut up dressings as best we might. By this time, owing to there not being a chair in the place, I confess my legs were almost giving way. Moreover, the injection took speedy effect, and a stiffening arm and rising temperature do not facilitate work of this kind. Frankly, I do not think any of us will ever be as busy again, and our one prayer was for strength to "carry on." Many of the men were tormented by coughs that kept the others awake. All we had to give them was lukewarm water and the rinsings of a condensed milk tin. (For euphony we called it "milk.")
Those who could not sleep for vermin lit cigarette after cigarette until their supply ran out. At 2 A.M. we retired to the nurses' "bunk"—a whitewashed, rat-ridden, ill-smelling partitioned compartment, whose sole furniture consisted of two shelves—until someone was inspired to fetch the "dressing-table" (two empty boxes—oh, joy of joys! upon which we took it in turns to sit)—and a coke fire, on which we boiled eggs for our midnight meal. Half-way through my egg the orderly called me: "The prisoner can't last much longer. Will you come and speak to him, Sister?" It seemed as if the ward were one huge battlefield, for cries greeted me on all sides. "Get at 'em, lads!" shouted the burly Scot in the corner as he urged forward his comrades in his sleep. "Christ help us!" groaned an armless dragoon, coming round from the anæsthetic.
I soothed the dying German as best I could when the awful spasms came, and through his clenched teeth he signified the pain in the "kreuz" (small of the back). What could I say but "Guter Junge—bleib still. Es dauert nicht mehr lange!" ("Good boy—lie still. It will not last long now!") With his remaining hand he pressed mine as I wiped the pouring sweat from his brow. After all, suffering is a great leveller.
The orderly, an old South African campaigner, looked at the light that began to flood the sky.
"They usually go West at this hour," he remarked grimly, with a shudder. I shuddered too; the place was alive with spirits.
For a moment we seemed to hear the sigh of the departing, feel the rushing of many wings as they brushed past. Then a gaunt, muffled figure appeared at the door bearing a lantern, for all the world like a hoary figure of "Time," and we awoke to reality.
"I've brought down a trainload," he said. "A round dozen of them are urgent cases and must have beds."
Perforce we had to shift the sleeping forms on to the concrete floor, all bruised and torn and bleeding though they were, cutting shorter their all too short rest.
An officer was brought in wounded in the abdomen, but cheerfully talking of getting home. He, too, passed away before eight o'clock.