III

_Our Share of the Fifty Thousand_

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