the cook had just peeled an immense bucket of them and was putting them
on to boil when some German soldiers came and took the lot, and this so
infuriated the cook that we had to wait hours before we could get
another lot prepared and cooked for the patients' dinner. The
water-supply was another of our difficulties. All the watercourses in
the neighbourhood were polluted with dead bodies of men and horses and
no water was fit to drink. There was a horrible, greenish, foul-smelling
stream near the hospital, which I suppose eventually found its way into
the river, and it sickened me to imagine what we were drinking, even
though it was well boiled.

It was very hot weather and the men all dreadfully thirsty. There was
one poor Breton soldier dying of septicæmia, who lay in a small room off
the large ward. He used to shriek to every passer-by to give him drink,
and no amount of water relieved his raging thirst. That voice calling
incessantly night and day, "A boire, à boire!" haunted me long after he
was dead. The taste of long-boiled water is flat and nasty, so we made
weak decoctions of camomile-tea for the men, which they seemed to like
very much. We let it cool, and kept a jug of it on each locker so that
they could help themselves whenever they liked.

Some of the ladies of the town were very kind indeed in bringing in wine
and little delicacies for our sick, and for ourselves, too, sometimes.
We were very grateful to them for all their kindness in the midst of
their own terrible trouble and anxieties.

All the first ten days the cannon boomed without ceasing; by degrees it
got more distant, and we knew the forts of Maubeuge were being bombarded
by the famous German howitzers, which used to shake the hospital to its
foundations. The French soldiers in the wards soon taught us to