We slept that night in a hospital bed. The week before three thousand
men had passed through that hospital--some upon the long journey,
so we rose early the next morning. For some way to Henry and me
there seemed a curious disquietude about those hospital beds.

In the early morning just after dawn we saw them taking out the
dead from the hospital. The stretcher bearers moved as quickly as
they could with their burden through the yard. A dozen soldiers and
orderlies were in the hospital compound, but no one turned a head
toward the bearers and their burden. There were indeed, in sad deed,
"a dearth of woman's nursing and a lack of woman's tears." No one
knew who the dead man was. He wore his identification tag about
him. No one cared except that it should be registered. If he was
an officer he went to one part of the little graveyard just outside
the fence; if he was a private he went inside. It was a lonely,
heart-breaking sight. And it occurred to Henry and me--we had
been among the ghosts on the hill the night before and had slept
uneasily with the ghosts in the hospital--that we should give one
poor fellow a funeral. So we lined up in the chill dawn, and followed
the stretcher bearers and marched after some poor Frenchman to his
tomb. It was probably the only funeral that the hospital yard ever
had seen, for the soldiers and orderlies and attendants turned and
gaped at the wonder, and nurses peered from the windows.

Four days later we were sitting in the courtyard of a little tavern in
St. Dizier. A young French soldier came up, and tried his English
on us. He found that we had been to Verdun. And he asked, "Have
you heard the news from the big base hospital?" We had not. Then
he told us that the night before the German airmen had come to the