deserted, and the cannonade seemed to grow nearer and more
incessant. That first night the hush was so intense that every
reverberation from the dark hills beyond the walls brought out in
the mind its separate vision of destruction; and then, just as the
strained imagination could bear no more, the thunder ceased. A
moment later, in a court below my windows, a pigeon began to coo;
and all night long the two sounds strangely alternated...

On entering the gates, the first sight to attract us had been a
colony of roughly-built bungalows scattered over the miry slopes of
a little park adjoining the railway station, and surmounted by the
sign: "Evacuation Hospital No. 6." The next morning we went to visit
it. A part of the station buildings has been adapted to hospital
use, and among them a great roofless hall, which the surgeon in
charge has covered in with canvas and divided down its length into a
double row of tents. Each tent contains two wooden cots,
scrupulously clean and raised high above the floor; and the immense
ward is warmed by a row of stoves down the central passage. In the
bungalows across the road are beds for the patients who are to be
kept for a time before being transferred to the hospitals in the
town. In one bungalow an operating-room has been installed, in
another are the bathing arrangements for the newcomers from the
trenches. Every possible device for the relief of the wounded has
been carefully thought out and intelligently applied by the surgeon
in charge and the _infirmiere major_ who indefatigably seconds him.
Evacuation Hospital No. 6 sprang up in an hour, almost, on the
dreadful August day when four thousand wounded lay on stretchers
between the railway station and the gate of the little park across
the way; and it has gradually grown into the model of what such a
hospital may become in skilful and devoted hands.