From a jumbled confusion of recollection of these schoolhouse-hospitals
sundry incidental pictures stick out in my mind as I write this article.
I can shut my eyes and visualize the German I saw in the little parish
school building in the abandoned hamlet of Colligis near by the River
Aisne. He was in a room with a dozen others, all suffering from chest
wounds. He had been pierced through both lungs with a bullet, and to
keep him from choking to death the attendants had tied him in a half
erect posture. A sort of hammock-like sling passed under his arms, and
a rope ran from it to a hook in a wall and was knotted fast to the hook.
He swung there, neither sitting nor lying, fighting for the breath of
life, with an unspeakable misery looking out from his eyes; and he was
too far spent to lift a hand to brush away the flies that swarmed upon
his face and his lips and upon his bare, throbbing throat. The flies
dappled the faces of his fellow sufferers with loathsome black dots;
they literally masked his.
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