I remember quite distinctly the very first of these funerals that I witnessed.  Possibly I remember it with such distinctness because it was the firSt. On our way to the advance positions of the Germans we had come as far as Chimay, which is an old Belgian town just over the frontier from France.  I was sitting on a bench just outside the doorway of a parochial school conducted by nuns, which had been taken over by the conquerors and converted into a temporary receiving hospital for men who were too seriously wounded to stand the journey up into Germany.  All the surgeons on duty here were Germans, but the nursing force was about equally divided between nuns and Lutheran deaconesses who had been brought overland for this duty.  Also there were several volunteer nurses—­the wife of an officer, a wealthy widow from Dusseldorf and a school-teacher from Coblenz among them.  Catholic and Protestant, Belgian and French and German, they all labored together, cheerfully and earnestly doing drudgery of the most exacting, the most unpleasant sorts.

One of the patronesses of the hospital, who was also its manager ex officio, had just left with a soldier chauffeur for a guard and a slightly wounded major for an escort.  She was starting on a three-hundred-mile automobile run through a half subdued and dangerous country, meaning to visit base hospitals along the German frontier until she found a supply of anti-tetanus serum.  Lockjaw, developing from seemingly trivial wounds in foot or hand, had already killed six men at Chimay within a week.  Four more were dying of the same disease.  So, since no able-bodied men could be spared from the overworked staffs of the lazarets, she was going for a stock of the serum which might save still other victims.  She meant to travel day and night, and if a bullet didn’t stop her and if the automobile didn’t go through a temporary bridge she would be back, she thought, within forty-eight hours.  She had already made several trips of the sort upon similar missions.  Once her car had been fired at and once it had been wrecked, but she was going again.  She was from near Cologne, the wife of a rich manufacturer now serving as a captain of reserves.  She hadn’t heard from him in four weeks.  She didn’t know whether he still lived.  She hoped he lived, she told us with simple fortitude, but of course these times one never knew.

It was just before sundown.  The nuns had gone upstairs to their little chapel for evening services.  Through an open window of the chapel just above my head their voices, as they chanted the responses between the sonorous Latin phrases of the priest who had come to lead them in their devotions, floated out in clear sweet snatches, like the songs of vesper sparrows.  Behind me, in a paved courtyard, were perhaps twenty wounded men lying on cots.  They had been brought out of the building and put in the sunshine.  They were on the way to recovery; at least most of