It was ten o'clock when the first cars came crunching into the station yard, and the convoys arrived one after another until five in the morning. Then, as we could take in no more, the stream was diverted to the other clearing station up the road. Before the war the deep hoot of a car always seemed to say: 'Here am I, rich and rotund, rolling comfortably on my way; I have laid up much goods and can take mine ease'; but after that night it had another meaning: 'Slowly, tenderly, oh! be pitiful. I am broken and in pain,' as the cars crept along over the uneven roads. These were our share of the wounded from Loos, the overflow of serious 'stretcher cases' who could not be taken in at the already overworked stations immediately behind their own front. Many had been lying on the battlefield many hours. They were for the most part from the 15th (Scottish) Division and the 47th (London) Division. Both had made a deathless name. The former got further forward than any other, and paid the penalty with over six thousand casualties. All this night the rain fell in torrents. It streamed from the tops and sides of the ambulances, it lashed the yard till it rose in a fine spray; the lamps shone on wetness everywhere--the dripping, anxious faces of the drivers, the pallid faces of the wounded, eyes staring over their drenched brown blankets, eyes puzzled in their pain and distress, like those of hunted animals; and the reception room was filled with the choking odours of steaming dirty blankets and uniforms, of drying human bodies and of wounds and mortality. As each ambulance arrived the stretchers, their occupants for the most part silent, were drawn gently out and carried into the reception hall and laid upon the floor. At once each man--the nature of whose wounds permitted it--was given a cup of hot tea or of cold water, and a cigarette. Two by two they were lifted on to the trestles, and examined and dressed by the surgeons. Their fortitude was, as one of the surgeons said to me, uncanny. It was supernatural. I could not have believed what could be endured without complaint, often without even a word to express the horrid pain, unless I had seen it. Amid all that battered, bleeding, shattered flesh and bone, the human spirit showed itself a very splendid thing that night. The reception room at last filled to overflowing and could not be emptied. All the wards and lofts and tents were crammed. By the time the other station was filled the two had taken in three thousand men. They remained with us for a week, because the hospital trains were too busy behind Loos to come our way. Every day every man had to have his wounds dressed. Some were covered with wounds; many of the wounds were dangerous, all were painful; and gas gangrene, which the surgeon so hates to see, had to be fought again and again. The medical staff, seven in number, worked on day after day, and night after night, skilfully, tenderly, ruthlessly. There were also a great many operations, and