Every man would have, tied about his neck or to one of his buttonholes, the German field-doctor's card telling of the nature of his hurt and the place where he had sustained it; and the uniform of nearly every one would be discolored with dried blood, and where the coat gaped open you marked that the harsh, white cambric lining was made harsher still by stiff, brownish- red streakings.
In at the door of the improvised hospital filed the parade, and the wounded men dropped on the floor or else were lowered upon chairs and tables and cots--anywhere that there was space for them to huddle up or stretch out.

And then the overworked surgeons, French and German, and the German nursing sisters and certain of the orderlies would fall to.
There was no time for the finer, daintier proceedings that might have spared the sufferers some measure of their agony.

It was cut away the old bandage, pull off the filthy cotton, dab with antiseptics what was beneath, pour iodine or diluted acid upon the bare and shrinking tissues, perhaps do that with the knife or probe which must be done where incipient mortification had set in, clap on fresh cotton, wind a strip of cloth over it, pin it in place and send this man away to be fed--providing he could eat; then turn to the next poor wretch.

The first man was out of that place almost before the last man was in; that was how fast the work went forward.
One special horror was spared: The patients made no outcry.

They gritted their teeth and writhed where they lay, but none shrieked out.
Indeed, neither here nor at any of the other places where I saw wounded men did we hear that chorus of moans and shrieks with which fiction always has invested such scenes.