We would see these things, and we would wonder if these schoolhouses could ever shake off the scents and the stains and the memories of these present grim visitations—­wonder if children would ever frolic any more in the courtyards where the ambulances stood now with red drops trickling down from their beds upon the gravel.  But that, on our part, was mere morbidness born of the sights we saw.  Children forget even more quickly than their elders forget, and we knew, from our own experience, how quickly the populace of a French or Flemish community could rally back to a colorable counterfeit of their old sprightliness, once the immediate burdens of affliction and captivity had been lifted from off them.

From a jumbled confusion of recollection of these schoolhouse-hospitals sundry incidental pictures stick out in my mind as I write this article.  I can shut my eyes and visualize the German I saw in the little parish school building in the abandoned hamlet of Colligis near by the River Aisne.  He was in a room with a dozen others, all suffering from chest wounds.  He had been pierced through both lungs with a bullet, and to keep him from choking to death the attendants had tied him in a half erect posture.  A sort of hammock-like sling passed under his arms, and a rope ran from it to a hook in a wall and was knotted fast to the hook.  He swung there, neither sitting nor lying, fighting for the breath of life, with an unspeakable misery looking out from his eyes; and he was too far spent to lift a hand to brush away the flies that swarmed upon his face and his lips and upon his bare, throbbing throat.  The flies dappled the faces of his fellow sufferers with loathsome black dots; they literally masked his.  I preserve a memory which is just as vivid of certain things I saw in a big institution in Laon.  Although in German hands, and nominally under German control, the building was given over entirely to crippled and ailing French prisoners.  These patients were minded and fed by their own people and attended by captured French surgeons.  In our tour of the place I saw only two men wearing the German gray.  One was the armed sentry who stood at the gate to see that no recovering inmate slipped out, and the other was a German surgeon-general who was making his daily round of inspection of the hospitals and had brought us along with him.  Of the native contingent the person who appeared to be in direct charge was a handsome, elderly lady, tenderly solicitous of the frowziest Turco in the wards and exquisitely polite, with a frozen politeness, to the German officer.  When he saluted her she bowed to him deeply and ceremoniously and silently.  I never thought until then that a bow could be so profoundly executed and yet so icily cold.  It was a lesson in congealed manners.

As we were leaving the room a nun serving as a nurse hailed the German and told him one of her charges was threatening to die, not because of his wound, but because he had lost heart and believed himself to be dying.