The military situation improved daily, but the battle was no less strenuous. The guns used by the enemy for the destruction of men produced horrible wounds, certainly more severe on the whole than those we had tended during the first twenty months of a war that has been pitiless from its inception. All doctors must have noted the hideous success achieved in a very short time, in perfecting means of laceration. And we marvelled bitterly that man could adventure his frail organism through the deflagrations of a chemistry hardly disciplined as yet, which attains and surpasses the brutality of the blind forces of Nature. We marvelled more especially that flesh so delicate, the product and the producer of harmony, could endure such shocks and such dilapidations without instant disintegration. Many men came to us with one or several limbs torn off completely, yet they came still living.... Some had thirty or forty wounds, and even more. We examined each body systematically, passing from one sad discovery to another. They reminded us of those derelict vessels which let in the water everywhere. And just because these wrecks seemed irredeemably condemned to disaster, we clung to them in the obstinate hope of bringing them into port and perhaps floating them again. When the pressure was greatest, it was impossible to undress the men and get them washed properly before bringing them into the operating-ward. The problem was in these cases to isolate the work of the knife as far as possible from the surrounding mud, dirt and vermin: I have seen soldiers so covered with lice that the different parts of the dressings were invaded by them, and even the wounds. The poor creatures apologised, as if they were in some way to blame.... At such moments patients succeeded each other so rapidly that we knew nothing of them beyond their wounds: the man was carried away, still plunged in sleep; we had made all the necessary decisions for him without having heard his voice or considered his face. We avoided overcrowding by at once evacuating all those on whom we had operated as soon as they were no longer in danger of complications. We loaded them up on the ambulances which followed one upon the other before the door. Some of the patients came back a few minutes later, riddled with fragments of shell; the driver had not succeeded in dodging the shells, and he was often wounded himself. In like manner the stretcher-bearers as they passed along the road were often hit themselves, and were brought in on their own hand-carts. One evening there was a "gas warning." Some gusts of wind arrived, bearing along an acrid odour. All the wounded were given masks and spectacles as a precaution. We hung them even on the heads of the beds where dying men lay... and then we waited. Happily, the wave spent itself before it reached us.