To burn powder hour after hour and
day after day and week after week at a foe who never sees you and whom
you never see; to go at this dreary, heavy trade of war with the sober,
uninspired earnestness of convicts building a prison wall about
themselves--the ghastly unreality of the proposition left me mentally
numbed.
Howsoever, we arrived not long after that at a field hospital--namely,
Field Hospital Number 36, and here was realism enough to satisfy the
lexicographer who first coined the word. This field hospital was
established in eight abandoned houses of the abandoned small French
village of Colligis, and all eight houses were crowded with wounded men
lying as closely as they could lie upon mattresses placed side by side
on the floors, with just room to step between the mattresses. Be it
remembered also that these were all men too seriously wounded to be
moved even to a point as close as Laon; those more lightly injured than
these were already carried back to the main hospitals.
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