Louvain and Rheim's, the scandal of the world.[7]

And the people bleed; yes, it is always the people who bleed. The trains
arrive at the hospital bases, hundreds, positively hundreds of them,
full of wounded. Shattered human forms lie in thousands on straw inside
the trucks and wagons, or sit painfully reclined in the passenger
compartments, their faces grimed, their clothes ragged, their toes
protruding from their boots. Some have been stretched on the battlefield
for forty-eight hours, or even more, tormented by frost at night,
covered with flies by day, without so much as a drink of water. And
those that have not already become a mere lifeless heap of rags have
been jolted in country carts to some railway-station, and there, or at
successive junctions, have been shunted on sidings for endless hours.
And now, with their wounds still slowly bleeding or oozing, they are
picked out by tender hands, and the most crying cases are roughly,
dressed before consigning to a hospital. And some faces are shattered,
hardly recognizable, and some have limbs torn away; and there are
internal wounds unspeakable, and countenances deadly pallid, and
moanings which cannot be stifled, and silences worse than moans.

Yes, the agony and bloody sweat of battlefields endured for the
domination or the ambition of a class is appalling. But in many cases,
though more dramatic and appealing to the imagination, one may doubt if
it is worse than the year-long and age-long agony of daily life endured
for the same reason.

Maeterlinck, in his eloquent and fiery letter to the _Daily Mail_ of
September 14th, maintained that the whole German nation is equally to
blame in this affair--that all classes are equally involved in it, with
no _degrees_ of guilt. We may excuse the warmth of personal feeling