Each night the Furnes Hospital was full with one hundred wounded. In the
morning we carried out one or two or one-half dozen dead. The wounds
were severe, the air of the whole countryside was septic from the sour
dead in the fields, who kept working to the surface from their shallow
burial. There was a morning when we had gone early to the front on a
hurry call. In our absence two girl nurses carried out ten dead from the
wards into the convent lot, to the edge of the hasty graves made ready
for their coming.
There is one woman whom we have watched at work for twelve months. She
is a trained nurse, a certified midwife, a licensed motor-car driver, a
veterinarian and a woman of property. Her name is Mrs. Elsie Knocker, a
widow with one son. She helped to organize our corps. I was with her one
evening when a corporal ordered her to go up a difficult road. He was
the driver of a high-power touring car which could rise on occasion to
seventy miles an hour. He carried a rifle in his car, and told us he had
killed over fifty Germans since Liege. He dressed in bottle green, the
uniform of a cyclist, and he looked like a rollicking woodlander of the
Robin Hood band. It was seven o'clock of the evening. The night was
dark. He pitched a bag of bandages into the motor ambulance.
"Take those to the dressing station that lies two miles to the west of
Caeskerke," he ordered Mrs. Knocker. I cranked up the machine; Mrs.
Knocker sat at the wheel. We were at Oudecappelle. The going was halfway
decent as far as the crossroads of Caeskerke. Here we turned west on a
road through the fields which had been intermittently shelled for
several days. The road had shell holes in it from one to three feet
deep. We could not see them because we carried no lights and the sky
overhead was black. A mile to our right a village was burning. There
were sheets of flame rising from the lowland, and the flame revealed the
smoke that was thick over the ruins. We bumped in and out of the holes.
All roads in Belgium were scummy with mud. It is like butter on bread.
The big brown-canopied ambulance skidded in this paste.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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