Possibly I remember it with such distinctness because it was
the firSt. On our way to the advance positions of the Germans we had
come as far as Chimay, which is an old Belgian town just over the
frontier from France. I was sitting on a bench just outside the doorway
of a parochial school conducted by nuns, which had been taken over by
the conquerors and converted into a temporary receiving hospital for men
who were too seriously wounded to stand the journey up into Germany.
All the surgeons on duty here were Germans, but the nursing force was
about equally divided between nuns and Lutheran deaconesses who had been
brought overland for this duty. Also there were several volunteer
nurses--the wife of an officer, a wealthy widow from Dusseldorf and a
school-teacher from Coblenz among them. Catholic and Protestant,
Belgian and French and German, they all labored together, cheerfully and
earnestly doing drudgery of the most exacting, the most unpleasant
sorts.
One of the patronesses of the hospital, who was also its manager ex
officio, had just left with a soldier chauffeur for a guard and a
slightly wounded major for an escort.
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