So they cooked and cooked unceasingly and never stopped to wipe a pan or clean a spoon.
At our backs was the waiting room for first-class passengers, but no passengers of any class came to it any more, and so by common consent it was a sort of rest room for the Red Cross men, who mostly were Germans, but with a few captured Frenchmen among them, still wearing their French uniforms.

There were three or four French military surgeons--prisoners, to be sure, but going and coming pretty much as they pleased.

The tacit arrangement was that the Germans should succor Germans and that the Frenchmen should minister to their own disabled countrymen among the prisoners going north, but in a time of stress--and that meant every time a train came in from the south or west--both nationalities mingled together and served, without regard for the color of the coat worn by those whom they served.
Probably from the day it was put up this station had never been really and entirely clean.

Judged by American standards Continental railway stations are rarely ever clean, even when conditions are normal.

Now that conditions were anything but normal, this Maubeuge station was incredibly and incurably filthy.