Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/93

 March 26th. I stumbled into the morgue last night when I was trying to locate one of the brancardiers, out behind the château. It had been clear all evening and a beautiful moon was rising above the hill towards Montzèville. But its rays were not beautiful within the morgue. They showed far too clearly the mangled limbs and bodies of a dozen Frenchmen who had been brought down from Mort Homme the night before. Here a rough gunny sack covered the decapitated trunk of a young machine-gunner; and alongside it lay the abdomen and legs of another poor poilu whose feet had already rotted away before a kind Boche shell put him out of misery. Bouvier told me several of them had been stuck in the mud out there for three days after the attack and although unwounded when shells were breaking all around them they had died of hunger and exposure. People at home think that we are making tremendous sacrifices to come over here and do this work. But they are nothing compared to those which the simple, uneducated poilu makes.