It needs a greater pen than mine to do justice to all we saw that afternoon, for we went through all the wards and saw all the sights there were to see.  We saw a young Lieutenant, with large staring eyes, sitting up in bed.  When we approached him, he jumped round in his bed very violently, as though his body had been shot out of a gun, and went on staring at us, speechless and with eyes full of wild terror.  We saw two soldiers in the corner of a ward, their heads wobbling in perfect rhythm, ceaselessly from side to side, like the pendulum of a clock, with dead expressionless faces.  We saw men cowering beneath their bed clothes, trembling with an endless terror.  We saw a man who for months had quite lost his speech, and was now just able to whisper, almost inaudibly, “papa” and “mama,” a middle-aged man with a beard.  We saw a man with frightened eyes, like a child in a nightmare, with many of the outward signs of having been gassed, struggling for breath, gesticulating feebly, trying to ward off some imaginary blow.  He had not been gassed, but wounded in the head.  He was alone in a blue ward, where all our faces looked yellow.  We saw a youth lying asleep, white as a sheet and with hardly any flesh left on his bones.  He had been asleep for two months without ever waking.  We saw a splendid, tall, bearded man, a Cavalry Captain, with a deep voice and a firm handgrip, who could realise the present, but had forgotten all the past.  We saw a multitude of minor “tremblers,” and men undergoing electrical treatment for paralysis and stiffness of various limbs.  One little man, another University Professor, who was almost paralysed in both legs, tried to advance to meet us and nearly fell forward on the ground at our feet.  I spoke also to a young man with a paralysed back and left arm.  I said I hoped he would soon be better.  “Yes,” he said, “I hope soon to go back to the Front.”  For a moment I thought this was irony addressed to a countryman of Mr Lloyd George.  But it wasn’t.  He really meant it.  We went into the Convalescents’ Mess.  There were about twenty present, smiling and very gentle and quiet, like men who were not yet quite sure of the world.  One elderly man, a Medical Captain, said to me, very softly, that it was a great pleasure to see visitors from the outside, “especially our Allies.”  At that moment I could easily have wept.  Such sights as I had seen did not physically sicken, nor even much horrify, me.  They just tautened all my nerves and made me feel that all my questions were impertinent, and all my good wishes flat and empty, and that I resembled a visitor to a Zoo.

On the way back to Ferrara we talked of literature and Rossi, basing himself chiefly on Wells and Kipling, said that the English, judged by their modern writers, seemed to be a race “logical, but a little isolated.”