The night I went on duty there had been a scrap towards Maurepas or Le Forest. Happening between two days of tremendous fighting, it was one of those incidents which seldom call for a single line in the communiqués. Yet the wounded streamed in all night. As soon as they were lowered from the cars, we got them into a large tent. It was an immense canvas hall lit with electricity. It had been pitched on ground covered with stubble, and its rough soil was bristling with anæmic grass and badly pressed clods. Those among the wounded who could walk were directed along a passage railed off on both sides, as is done at theatre entrances to make the crowd line up into a queue. They seemed dazed and exhausted. We took away their arms, knives and grenades. They let you do anything to them: they were like children overcome with sleep. The massacre of Europe cannot proceed without organisation. All the acts of the play are based on the most detailed calculation. As these men filed past, they were counted and labelled; clerks verified their identity with the unconcerned accuracy of customs officials. They, on their part, replied with the patience of the eternal public at government inquiry offices. Sometimes they even ventured to make a remark. “Your name is Menu,” one cavalryman was asked. “Isn’t it?” And the cavalryman replied in a heart-rending tone: “Alas! it is, unfortunately.” I remember a little man whose arm was in a sling. A doctor was looking at his papers, and said: “You have a wound in your right arm?” And the man replied so modestly: “Oh! it is not a wound. It is only a hole!” In one corner of the tent they were giving out food and drink. A cook was carving slices of beef and cutting up a round of cheese. The wounded seized the food with their muddy and blood-stained hands; and they were eating slowly and with evident relish. The inference was plain. Many were suffering primarily from hunger and thirst. They sat timidly on a bench like some very poor guests at a buffet during a garden party. In front of them there were a score of wounded Germans who had been placed there indiscriminately. They were dozing or throwing hungry glances on the food and the pails of steaming tea. Hitting on a popular slang expression, a grey-haired infantryman, who was munching large pieces of boiled beef, said suddenly to the cook: “Hang it all! Why not give them a piece of bully-beef?” “Do you know them then?” said the cook jocularly. “Do I know them! The poor devils! We have been punching each other the whole blessed day. Chuck them a piece of meat. Why not?” A frivolous young man, short-sighted, with a turned-up nose, added in a tense voice: “Ought to be done, you know--our honour....”