inclined plane into the enormous shed which had been reserved for the
loading of the wounded into the ambulances.

We entered a great, high, white-washed, warehouse kind of place, about
four hundred feet long by four hundred feet wide, built of wood
evidently years before. In the middle of this shed was an open space,
and along the walls were rows of ambulances. Brancardiers
(stretcher-bearers; from brancard, a stretcher) were loading wounded
into these cars, and as soon as one car was filled, it would go out of
the hall and another would take its place. There was an infernal din;
the place smelled like a stuffy garage, and was full of blue gasoline
fumes; and across this hurly-burly, which was increasing every minute,
were carried the wounded, often nothing but human bundles of dirty blue
cloth and fouled bandages. Every one of these wounded soldiers was
saturated with mud, a gray-white mud that clung moistly to their
overcoats, or, fully dry, colored every part of the uniform with its
powder. One saw men that appeared to have rolled over and over in a
puddle bath of this whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a sinister
mixture of blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a wounded
soldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our human
relation to ordinary meat. Dirty, exhausted, unshaven, smelling of the
trenches, of his wounds, and of the antiseptics on his wounds, the
soldier comes from the train a sight for which only the great heart of
Francis of Assisi could have adequate pity.

Oiler and I went through an opening in a canvas partition into that part
of the great shed where the wounded were being unloaded from the trains.
In width, this part measured four hundred feet, but in length it ran to
eight hundred. In two rows of six each, separated by an aisle about
eight feet wide, were twelve little houses, about forty feet square,