The smell was awful, as some of the men had been there already
several days without having had their dressings done.
This was the state in which the hospital had been handed over to us. It
was a military hospital whose staff had had orders to leave at four
o'clock that morning, and they handed the whole hospital with its 270
patients over to us just as it was; and we could do very little towards
making it more comfortable for them. The stench of the whole place was
horrible, but it was too cold to do more than open the window for a
minute or two every now and then. It was no one's fault that things were
in such a horrible condition--it was just the force of circumstances and
the fortune of war that the place had been taxed far beyond its possible
capacities.
All night long the most terribly wounded men were being brought in from
the field, some were already dead when they arrived, others had only a
few minutes to live; all the rest were very cold and wet and exhausted,
and we had _nothing_ to make them comfortable. What a blessing hot-water
bottles would have been--but after all there would have been no hot
water to fill them if we had had them.
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