I am quite incapable of doing justice to this morning's entertainment.
"They" have been shelling the most thickly--and poorly--populated
part of this little mining town. Some of us went up into it getting
the wounded out. Houses, men, women, and children blown to pieces by
huge high explosives--and more shells coming over every few minutes,
all within a couple of hundred yards of the hospital. I want to tell
you all I see--all that happens to me out here, but I must fail to
convey it--and I don't want you quite to share my feelings. Amazing,
ironic contrasts abounded: within five minutes of each other came in a
self-possessed young woman of about ten to have the remains of her arm
cut off--perfectly calm--walked in--never cried or showed the least
excitement--_and_ a man of fifty on a stretcher with a mangled leg
who roared out in an enormous mad voice for his "Maman" over and over
again till he was anæsthetised. Could any creation of the imagination
equal this? Or this scene in a squalid kitchen:--a huge woman dead on
her face across the threshold, a little child also dead at her feet,
the legs of her men folk (husband and son?) straggling across the foot
way outside (I am keeping back all the hundreds of horrible details,
hard though it may be to believe it) and her remaining daughter a child
of about twelve--leaping back and forth over the bodies struggling
to get a chain from the neck of the body. "Souvenir!" I tried to get
her away--she was half mad--but was assailed fiercely by neighbours
on her behalf, who seemed to regard her desire for a memento of her
mother under the circumstances, most natural and commendable. While I
was being suppressed another shell came over and we went to earth in a
heap, the hundred yards away crash bringing down plaster and crockery
on to our heads and the flying pieces of "case" buzzing past the
windows like enormous bees or small aeroplanes. When they had settled
the child returned to the chain--armed now with a carving knife--and I
left her to it.