There was an old mill-house near Vlamertinghe, beyond Goldfish
Chateau, which was made into a casualty clearing station, and scores
of times when I passed it I saw it crowded with the "walking wounded,"
who had trudged down from the fighting-line, taking eleven hours,
fourteen hours sometimes, to get so far. They were no longer
"cheerful" like the gay lads who came lightly wounded out of earlier
battles, glad of life, excited by their luck. They were silent,
shivering, stricken men; boys in age, but old and weary in the
knowledge of war. The slime of the battlefields had engulfed them.
Their clothes were plastered to their bodies. Their faces and hands
were coated with that whitish clay. Their steel hats and rifles were
caked with it. Their eyes, brooding, were strangely alive in those
corpselike figures of mud who huddled round charcoal stoves or sat
motionless on wooden forms, waiting for ambulances. Yet they were
stark in spirit still.
"Only the mud beat us," they said.
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