the dead were taken from them, the mattresses riddled with fragments and soaked with blood.  Obviously no living thing could have survived in that awful hail.  When the shell came the soldiers were eating walnuts, and on the bed of one lay a walnut half opened and the little penknife he was using, and both were stained.  We turned away sickened at the sight, and retraced the passage with the nuns.  As we walked along, they pointed out to us marks we had not noticed before—­red finger-marks and splashes of blood on the pale blue distemper of the wall.  All down the passage and the staircase we could trace them, and even in the hall below.  Four men had been standing in the doorway of the upper ward.  Two were killed; the others, bleeding and blinded by the explosion, had groped their way along that wall and down the stair.  I have seen many terrible sights, but for utter and concentrated horror I have never seen anything to equal those finger-marks, the very sign-manual of Death.  When I think of them, I see, in the dim light of the early autumn morning, the four men talking; I hear the wild shriek of the shell and the deafening crash of its explosion; and then silence, and two bleeding men groping in darkness and terror for the air.

IX.  A Pause

The life of a hospital at the front is a curious mixture of excitement and dullness.  One week cases will be pouring in, the operating theatre will be working day and night, and everyone will have to do their utmost to keep abreast of the rush; next week there will be nothing to do, and everyone will mope about the building, and wonder why they were ever so foolish as to embark on such a futile undertaking.  For it is all emergency work, and there is none of the dull routine of the ordinary hospital waiting list, which we are always trying to clear off, but which is in reality the backbone of the hospital’s work.

When we first started in Antwerp, the rush of cases was so great as to be positively overwhelming.  For more than twenty-four hours the surgeons in the theatre were doing double work, two tables being kept going at the same time.  During that time a hundred and fifty wounded were admitted, all of them serious cases, and the hospital was full to overflowing.  For the next ten days we were kept busy, but then our patients began to recover, and many of them had to go away to military convalescent hospitals.  The wards began to look deserted, and yet no more patients arrived.  We began to think that it was all a mistake that we had come, that there would be no more fighting round Antwerp, and that we were not wanted.  Indeed, we canvassed the possibilities of work in other directions, and in the meantime we drew up elaborate arrangements to occupy our time.  There were to be courses of lectures and demonstrations in the wards, and supplies of books and papers were to be obtained.  Alas for the vanity of human schemes, the wounded began to pour in again, and not a lecture was given.