For
days and weeks that followed there was always a procession of
ambulances on the way to the dirty little town of Lillers, and going
along the roads I used to look back at them and see the soles of muddy
boots upturned below brown blankets. It was more human wreckage coming
down from the salient of Loos, from the chalkpits of Hulluch and the
tumbled earth of the Hohenzollern redoubt, which had been partly
gained by the battle which did not succeed. Outside a square brick
building, which was the Town Hall of Lillers, and for a time a
casualty clearing-station, the "bad" cases were unloaded; men with
chunks of steel in their lungs and bowels were vomiting great gobs of
blood, men with arms and legs torn from their trunks, men without
noses, and their brains throbbing through opened scalps, men without
faces . . .
XI
To a field behind the railway station near the grimy village of
Choques, on the edge of this Black Country of France, the prisoners
were brought; and I went among them and talked with some of them, on a
Sunday morning, when now the rain had stopped and there was a blue sky
overhead and good visibility for German guns and ours.
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