They were on their way. At the end of another twenty-four hour stretch they might have traveled fifty or sixty or even seventy miles. The place they left behind them was in worse case than before. Grease spattered the earth; the floor of the buffet room was ankle deep, literally, in discarded bandages and blood-stiffened cotton; and the nurses and the doctors and the helpers dropped down in the midst of it all to snatch a few precious minutes of rest before the next creaking caravan of misery arrived. There was no need to tell them of its coming; they knew. All through that afternoon and night, and through the next day and night, and through the half of the third day that we stayed on in Maubeuge, the trains came back. They came ten minutes apart, twenty minutes apart, an hour apart, but rarely more than an hour would elapse between trains. And this traffic in marred and mutilated humanity had been going on for four weeks and would go on for nobody knew how many weeks more. When the train had gone out of sight beyond the first turn to the eastward I spoke to the head surgeon of the German contingent--a broad, bearded, middle-aged man who sat on a baggage truck while an orderly poured a mixture of water and antiseptics over his soiled hands. "A lot of those poor devils will die?" I suggested. "Less than three per cent of those who get back to the base hospitals will die," he said with a snap of his jaw, as though challenging me to doubt the statement. "That is the wonder of this war--that so many are killed in the fighting and that so few die who get back out of it alive. These modern scientific bullets, these civilized bullets"--he laughed in self-derision at the use of the word--"they are cruel and yet they are merciful too. If they do not kill you outright they have a little way, somehow, of not killing you at all." "But the bayonet wounds and the saber wounds?" I said. "How about them?" "I have been here since the very first," he said; "since the day after our troops took this town, and God knows how many thousands of wounded men--Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Turcos, some Belgians--have passed through my hands; but as yet I have to see a man who has been wounded by a saber or a lance. I saw one bayonet wound yesterday or the day before. The man had fallen on his own bayonet and driven it into his side. Shrapnel wounds? Yes. Wounds from fragments of bombs? Again, yes. Bullet wounds? I can't tell you how many of those I have seen, but surely many thousands. But no bayonet wounds. This is a war of hot lead, not of cold steel. I read of these bayonet charges, but I do not believe that many such stories are true." I didn't believe it either.