]
The girl came with her stretcher at last, and we got the boy on it.
Then we went about setting up our feeding station. Hungry men limped in,
bandaged mostly about the head, and _how_ they consumed hard boiled eggs
and drank hot chocolate! I left the English girl dispensing food and
drink, while I took to the badly wounded a mixture of beaten egg, hot
milk and sugar. Here and there men asked for a piece of chocolate or
bread, but most of the wounded wanted only the liquid food. They would
say with their awful English cockney accent, "Ah! that's good!" or
"Prime stuff!" or "Could you spare a little more, sister?" In spite of
dreadful wounds, they were full of pluck.
[Sidenote: Great numbers of wounded in stretchers.]
For the next two hours I gave water and egg mixture to all sorts and
conditions of men--English, French, Canadians, Moroccans, Senegalese.
The doctor asked if I knew enough to administer morphine hypodermics,
and I regretfully admitted that I did not, while I registered a vow to
learn. Then some American Red Cross men appeared, and some English
doctors. Before midnight three or four long Red Cross trains had been
filled with wounded, and sent out. Yet at that hour more than five
hundred wounded men still lay on their stretchers on the grass outside.
And all the while, as I worked, I thought of how, as soon as the moon
came up, we should hear the familiar roar and rattle of the bombs, and
of how the shrapnel and machine gun bullets would rain down on those
upturned faces.
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