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.
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