At Daours the tents were filled to overflowing, until there was no more room. The wounded were laid down on the grass to wait their turn for the surgeon’s knife. Some of them crawled over to haycocks and covered themselves with hay and went to sleep, as I saw them sleeping there, like dead men. Here and there shell-shocked boys sat weeping or moaning, and shaking with an ague. Most of the wounded were quiet and did not give any groan or moan. The lightly wounded sat in groups, telling their adventures, cursing the German machine-gunners. Young officers spoke in a different way, and with that sporting spirit which they had learned in public schools praised their enemy.

“The machine-gunners are wonderful fellows⁠—topping. Fight until they’re killed. They gave us hell.”

Each man among those thousands of wounded had escaped death a dozen times or more by the merest flukes of luck. It was this luck of theirs which they hugged with a kind of laughing excitement.