They were bringing in more men, newly wounded that day, as we came out
of Doctor Schilling's improvised operating room in the little village
schoolhouse, and one of the litter bearers was a smart-faced little
London Cockney, a captured English ambulance-hand, who wore a German
soldier's cap to save him from possible annoyance as he went about his
work. Not very many wounded had arrived since the morning--it was a
dull day for them, the surgeons said--but I took note that, when the Red
Cross men put down a canvas stretcher upon the courtyard flags and
shortly thereafter took it up again, it left a broad red smear where it
rested against the flat stones. Also this stretcher and all the other
stretchers had been so sagged by the weight of bodies that they
threatened to rip from the frames, and so stained by that which had
stained them that the canvas was as stiff as though it had been
varnished and revarnished with many coats of brown shellac. But it
wasn't shellac. There is just one fluid which leaves that brown, hard
coating when it dries upon woven cloth.
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