The girl stood on the arena itself. Of concern for her personal
safety she had none. It was all like a play on the stage to her. You
watch the blow and flash but you are not a part of the action.
Each night the Furnes Hospital was full with one hundred wounded. In the
morning we carried out one or two or one-half dozen dead. The wounds
were severe, the air of the whole countryside was septic from the sour
dead in the fields, who kept working to the surface from their shallow
burial. There was a morning when we had gone early to the front on a
hurry call. In our absence two girl nurses carried out ten dead from the
wards into the convent lot, to the edge of the hasty graves made ready
for their coming.
There is one woman whom we have watched at work for twelve months. She
is a trained nurse, a certified midwife, a licensed motor-car driver, a
veterinarian and a woman of property. Her name is Mrs. Elsie Knocker, a
widow with one son. She helped to organize our corps. I was with her one
evening when a corporal ordered her to go up a difficult road. He was
the driver of a high-power touring car which could rise on occasion to
seventy miles an hour. He carried a rifle in his car, and told us he had
killed over fifty Germans since Liege. He dressed in bottle green, the
uniform of a cyclist, and he looked like a rollicking woodlander of the
Robin Hood band.
Pages:
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132