The little wayside Calvaries are daily smothered in the dust of motor-lorries. Peaceful French domesticity makes an attempt to live its life in the welter of trains and 'planes, tractors and lorries, cars and cycles, horse and foot. It will get it lived _après la guerre_--not before. The children of the villages do not play much; they gaze open-mouthed and wide-eyed at the incessant train of troops and strident vehicles. Unless the War finishes soon, they will have forgotten how to play. The village estaminet is no longer the haunt of the light-hearted, light-speaking, wine-sipping French _paysan_; it is overcrowded with noisy, sweaty Tommies who have no abiding city, demanding drink. The air of it reeks. The girls are too busy for repartee; they have time only for feverish serving.
Passenger trains are rarely to be seen--traffic _militaire_ by day and by night. Rural domestic journeys on the _chemin de fer_ are over and gone. It is supplies or troops or guns; a frantic railway staff and a frenzied _chef de gare_ who has forgotten what smooth and intermittent traffic on his line is like.
The ----th C.C.S. claims to be the hospital farthest advanced on the Somme. The claim is justified. Its grounds are lit at night by the gun-flashes. The discharge of our own heavies rattles the bottles in its dispensary and makes its canvas tremble. Sleep is sometimes driven from the eyes of its patients, not by pain, but by the thunder of bombardment. Convoys from the dressing stations have but a short run. The wounded arrive with the trench-mud wet upon them. Clearing them up is quick, if filthy, work, and in clearing them up is engaged a small battalion of orderlies.
The whole hospital is under canvas, except the operating-theatre, which is a hut, hermetically sealed, as it were, and heated to a working temperature--and, incidentally, an even temperature--by some ingenious device. Surgery cannot get done with numbed hands. Yes--and the officers' ward is a hut, to deepen the great gulf fixed between Tommy and his officer, even when they both are in mortal pain. The difference in the degrees of comfort between a marquee and a hut, in the Somme winter, is incredible. Unhappily, too, in these winter months there is a horrible shortage of coal and paraffin. This tells again in favour of the hut. The officers' hut is as warm as your civilian sitting-room, and wellnigh as comfortably furnished. No ingenuity could make it possible to say this of a marquee.