What, in better days than these, had been the lunch room was a place for the redressing of hurts.
Its high counters, which once held sandwiches and tarts and wine bottles, were piled with snowdrifts of medicated cotton and rolls of lint and buckets of antiseptic washes and drug vials.

The ticket booth was an improvised pharmacy.

Spare medical supplies filled the room where formerly fussy customs officers examined the luggage of travelers coming out of Belgium into France.

Just beyond the platform a wooden booth, with no front to it, had been knocked together out of rough planking, and relays of cooks, with greasy aprons over their soiled gray uniforms, made vast caldrons of stews--always stews--and brewed so-called coffee by the gallon against the coming of those who would need it.

The stuff was sure to be needed, all of it and more too.