Over There | Page 8

hills of coils, formidable barbed wire, far surpassing that
of farmers, well contrived to tear to pieces any human being who,
having got into its entanglement, should try to get out again. One
thought that nothing but steam-chisels would be capable of cutting it.
Also stacks of timber for shoring up mines which sappers would dig
beneath the enemy trenches. Also sacks to be filled with earth for
improvised entrenching. Also the four-pointed contraptions called
chevaux de frise, which--however you throw them--will always stick a
fatal point upwards, to impale the horse or man who cannot or will not
look where he is going. Even tarred paper, for keeping the weather out
of trenches or anything else. And all these things in unimagined
quantities.
Close by, a few German prisoners performing sanitary duties under a
guard. They were men in God's image, and they went about on the
assumption that all the rest of the war lay before them and that there
was a lot of it. A General told us that he had mentioned to them the
possibility of an exchange of prisoners, whereupon they had gloomily
and pathetically protested. They very sincerely did not want to go back
whence they had come, preferring captivity, humiliation, and the basest
tasks to a share in the great glory of German arms. To me they had a
brutalised air, no doubt one minor consequence of military ambition in
high places.
Not many minutes away was a hospital--what the French call an
ambulance de premiere ligne, contrived out of a factory. This was the
hospital nearest to the trenches in that region, and the wounded come to
it direct from the dressing-stations which lie immediately behind the
trenches. When a man falls, or men fall, the automobile is telephoned

for, and it arrives at the appointed rendezvous generally before the
stretcher-bearers, who may have to walk for twenty or thirty minutes
over rough ground. A wounded man may be, and has been, operated
upon in this hospital within an hour of his wounding. It is organised on
a permanent basis, for cases too serious for removal have, of course, to
remain there. Nevertheless, these establishments are, as regards their
staff, patients, and material, highly mobile.
One hospital of two hundred beds was once entirely evacuated within
sixty minutes upon a sudden order. We walked through small ward
after small ward, store-room after store-room, aseptic operating-room
and septic operating-room, all odorous with ether, and saw little but
resignation, and not much of that, for patients happened to be few. Yet
the worn face of the doctor in charge showed that vast labours must
have been accomplished in those sombre chambers.
In the very large courtyard a tent operating-hospital was established.
The white attendants were waiting within in the pallid obscurity,
among tables, glass jars, and instruments. The surgeon's wagon, with
hot-water and sterilising apparatus, was waiting without. The canvas
organism was a real hospital, and the point about it was that it could
move off complete at twenty-five minutes' notice and set itself up again
in any other ordained location in another twenty-five minutes.
Another short ride, and we were in an aviation park, likewise tented, in
the midst of an immense wheatfield on the lofty side of a hill. There
were six hangars of canvas, each containing an aeroplane and serving
as a dormitory; and for each aeroplane a carriage and a motor--for
sometimes aeroplanes are wounded and have to travel by road; it takes
ninety minutes to dismount an aeroplane. Each corps of an army has
one of these escadrilles or teams of aeroplanes, and the army as a whole
has an extra one, so that, if an army consists of eight corps, it possesses
fifty-four aeroplanes. I am speaking now of the particular type of
aeroplane employed for regulating artillery fire. It was a young
non-commissioned officer with a marked Southern accent who
explained to us the secret nature of things. He was wearing both the
Military Medal and the Legion of Honour, for he had done wondrous

feats in the way of shooting the occupants of Taubes in mid-air. He got
out one of the machines, and exhibited its tricks and its wireless
apparatus, and invited us to sit in the seat of the flier. The weather was
quite unsuitable for flying, but, setting four men to hold the machine in
place, he started the Gnome motor and ran it up to two thousand
revolutions a minute, creating a draught which bowed the fluttered
wheat for many yards behind and blew hats off. And in the middle of
this pother he continued to offer lucid and surprising explanations to
deafened ears until his superior officer, excessively smart and looking
like a cross between a cavalryman and a yachtsman, arrived on the