HOSPITAL SHIPS IN THE HARBOUR
Yet France in war-time to anyone incapacitated is wellnigh unbearable.
Again and again unpleasant scenes come up (and when humour flags is life worth living?). The subaltern so unnerved by the sight of his batman (only slightly hit) who was drowned in the mud, that he could do nothing but reiterate, with staring eyes, "And, for all I know, he is there still." Tales of healthy bits of land where, if you ask your way to a certain reserve trench, the direction will be: "First on the left, and past the dead Frenchman on the ant-heap," half-humorous reminiscences of trench-digging where other things—no need to specify—besides caps and boots are turned up, haunt one incessantly, and Morpheus refuses to be wooed.
All day long one notes the veering wind with beating heart, conscious that the prevailing west wind is all-propitious to the German's latest invention of the Devil, the poison-gas; conscious of the long nights in which one has lain awake as the sound of the receding sea was replaced by the ghastly choking of the ward of gassed cases opposite (a sound comparable only to a roomful of panting dogs), or the cough of the man dying with a bullet through his lungs.
May 14th. At home there are strikes and rumours of strikes, instigated, no doubt, by German emissaries, but none the less shameful for that; and one and all, as the men come down from that "hell with the lid off," where, inch by inch, the Germans are regaining that for which so many lives were sacrificed, their cry is for ammunition.
"We could have held our lines but for the lack of ammunition of the right kind," they say—for it seems that ordinary shells are useless when pitted against high explosives and gas.
No one who has not heard that appeal direct from dying lips (for dying men don't lie) can know how great is the longing to tell about it at home—to let the slackers know that for each shell not forthcoming ten valuable lives are lost, ten homes needlessly bereaved. It is intolerably unjust that the man who refuses to do his duty out here is promptly shot, whilst the man who strikes at home is merely bribed with offers of higher wages.
After all, it is a war not only of men, but of arms and ammunition, and it lies in the hands of those at home as much as those out here to see the thing through.