My War Experiences in Two Continents by S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
page 49 of 301 (16%)
page 49 of 301 (16%)
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Flanders was all spent behind the French and Belgian lines.--ED.
Mrs. Knocker came into Dunkirk for a night's rest while I was staying there. She had been out all the previous day in a storm of wind and rain driving an ambulance. It was heavy with wounded, and shells were dropping very near. She--the most courageous woman that ever lived--was quite unnerved at last. The glass of the car she was driving was dim with rain and she could carry no lights, and with this swaying load of injured men behind her on the rutty road she had to stick to her wheel and go on. Some one said to her, "There is a doctor in such-and-such a farmhouse, and he has no dressings. You must take him these." She demurred (a most unusual thing for her), but men do not protect women in this war, and they said she had to take them. She asked one of the least wounded of the men to get down and see what was in front of her, and he disappeared altogether. The dark mass she had seen in the road was a huge hole made by a shell! After steering into dead horses and going over awful roads Mrs. Knocker came bumping into the yard, steering so badly that they ran to see what was wrong, and they found her fainting, and she was carried into the house. At Dunkirk she got a good dinner and a night's rest. _Furnes. 5 November._--The hospital is beginning to fill up again, and the nurses are depressed because only those cases which are nearly hopeless are allowed to stay, so it is death on all sides and just a hell of suffering. One man yelled to me to-night to kill him. I wish I might have done so. The tragedy of war presses with a fearful weight after being in a hospital, and wherever one is one hears the infernal |
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