It was impossible to keep a candle alight down any of
the passages unless it were protected in a lantern, and a cold mist
crept into the house, stealthily striking one with a clammy chill. I
stayed up most of the night in the kitchen, having volunteered to
stoke the fires and fill hot-water bottles for the wounded. Most of the
nurses had gone to bed utterly exhausted. Only two or three of them
remained in the wards with one of the doctors. Every now and then
the outer bell would jangle, and I would hear the wheels of an
ambulance crunching into the courtyard.
"Blesses!" said a woman who was watching the fires with me.
But we could not take in another blesse as there were no more beds
or bed-spaces, and after despairing conversations Belgian
ambulance officers at the front door of the convent went elsewhere.
The house became very quiet except for the noise of the wind and
the rain. In the scullery where I sat by the stoves which were in my
charge, I could only hear one voice speaking. It was speaking two
rooms away, in a long, incessant monologue of madness. Now and
again a white-faced nurse came out for newly-filled water-bottles, and
while I scalded my fingers with screws which would not fit and with
boiling water poured into narrow necks, she told me about a French
officer who was dying.
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