The crop of the dead was the one sure crop upon which embattled Europe might count.

That harvest could not fail the warring nations, however scanty other yields might be.
In the towns in occupied territory the cemeteries were the only actively and constantly busy spots to be found, except the hospitals.

Every schoolhouse was a hospital; indeed I think there can be no schoolhouse in the zone of actual hostilities that has not served such a purpose.
In their altered aspects we came to know these schoolhouses mighty well.
We would see the wounded going in on stretchers and the dead coming out in boxes.

We would see how the blackboards, still scrawled over perhaps with the chalked sums of lessons which never were finished, now bore pasted-on charts dealing in nurses' and surgeons' cipher-manual, with the bodily plights of the men in the cots and on the mattresses beneath.
We would see classrooms where plaster casts and globe maps and dusty textbooks had been cast aside in heaps to make room on desktops and shelves for drugs and bandages and surgical appliances.

We would see the rows of hooks intended originally for the caps and umbrellas of little people; but now from each hook dangled the ripped, bloodied garments of a soldier--gray for a German, brown-tan for an Englishman, blue-and-red for a Frenchman or a Belgian.