WE did not perceive the camp of Section 3, American Ambulance Field Service, until we were close upon it---there was too much to see in the opposite direction. For as we drove rapidly along a road which might get a shellshower at any moment, our military guide, who was also driving the car, pointed and said: "The Mort-Homme is over there," and we became aware of a magnificent day-fireworks display. It was a warm, cloudless afternoon, good weather for aeroplane work. The sky above that distant, peaceful-looking ridge kept spawning lines and groups of little sudden, round clouds, which dissipated themselves only to be succeeded by other groups of little sudden, round clouds. You would put the glasses upon them and make out, somewhere near the centre of this disturbance, an aeroplane going calmly about its business. Sometimes it would lean sidewise and shift its position before it resumed its soaring. These near-by puffs were snow-white against the blue sky-French anti-aeroplane shrapnel. But the glasses revealed other and darker puffs in the distance-German shrapnel bombarding French planes. Where it was untouched by man, the landscape rolled away as sweet and gentle as anything France knows---grassy ridges, hill forests of soft green underbrush, chequer-boarded farms. in places, however, it was horribly creased by grotesque military works ; and here and there stained, battered military transport raised white dust along the roads. The, guns were going in a lazy afternoon bombardment on three directions of the horizon and far before us a black geyser spurted up now and then from the fall of a big shell.

"There they are! " said Piatt Andrew, the Big Boss of the American Ambulance sections at the Verdun front. Andrew had by chance wet his lips a moment before; they shone out red from his dust-caked face, giving the effect of a clown make-up.

We had brought up on the edge of a rolling meadow bordered by a wood. Parked at the edge of the trees were a score of little American Ford automobiles; in the foreground stood all the paraphernalia of a camp. 'There was a whoop from the tent, and half a dozen men in khaki came running toward us. They had the eager American face, contrasting oddly with the keen but sober French face which we had been seeing all day as we ran through the dunnage of the army. Another group detached itself from a knot in the grass. A form which seemed somehow familiar emerged from among them. This man---built, body and face, like a little battleship---had varied the regulation uniform by a very torn and spattered football jersey, and an old pair of golf-stockings. I had seen him before in similar clothes---where ? It came back: breaking the Yale line. It was Ralph Bluthenthal, the old Princeton All-American centre.

"Say, you fellows! " yelled Bluthenthal, "how did the boat-race come out?"

It was their hour of ease, at the end of ten days such as no American Ambulance section had endured yet, and I dread to think what a strict inspection-officer would have had to say about their uniforms. Price wore a very torn old yellow sweater over his khaki shirt. He had removed his puttees----" to give his legs a chance," he said---and pulled up a pair of grey-wool soldier stockings to the edge of his military breeches. Others, also, had abandoned puttees or leggings, and the unbuttoned fringes of their breeches flapped in the breeze. Potter, who had been taking a nap by himself in the woods, came dodging through the bushes. He was clad simply in a hospital bath-robe over a khaki shirt. And every one began to talk all at once, while the guns growled on and the smoke-puffs continued to blossom and fade along the battle-edge of the horizon.

It was ten days or so since the last of our seven American sections, as a compliment to their efficiency and quickness, had been shifted to Verdun. The French put them on different runs ; and Section 3, a it turned out, had drawn probably the most difficult of all---a road of shell-holes and shell-showers, of constant perplexity and danger. They looked tired, drawn, and, for all their native American enthusiasm, a little discouraged.

"If you want to see the marks," said one of them, "come and look at our car-hospital!"

Four of the little uniform cars, furnished with covered wooden bodies to carry stretchers, stood on the edge of the camp. The first in line had a gaping hole blown through the body just behind the driver's seat. There was another hole in the side ; there were little splashy marks all over the tool-chest and running-gear. Wheeler, the driver of this car, led me round to the back. Within, along the runways which hold the stretchers, was a dark-brown stain; a pool of that stain darkened the floor.

"I was changing tires when it came," he said; "lucky I wasn't in the seat. I heard it whistling, and spread-eagled under the car. Look! " he pointed to a dent in the steel of the tool-box----" I was standing right there before I ducked! I had the tire nearly on. I finished pumping, and started. Then we got that!" He pointed to the hole in the side. " My blessé (wounded man) on the top shelf wasn't badly hurt when we started. This peppered him all over, and nearly took off his foot. I drove to the Poste de Secours and we patched him up. Whew! " he concluded. Though none of the other three cars was so badly damaged as this, they were all battered and spattered with shell-fragments and shrapnel. "And there's one out there," concluded my guide, "which will stay until the end of the war. It's lying beside the road. It was Barber's. He heard the shell coming, and crouched down. It got him in the back." Of Barber I had already learned news that day they were keeping him at the advanced base-hospital until he could be moved to the care of his countrymen in Paris. He was out of danger; and the French had given him the Military Medal for valour.

Price, who had strolled over to point out the damaged spots on the cars, had a battered nose. It looked as though he'd been in a fight. "Shrapnel just shaved it," he said, " I paid four hundred dollars last year to get that nose fixed up, and it's a dead loss. That wasn't all. I got a ball in the book in my left breast pocket. It ought to have been a Testament, of course. But it wasn't. It was my passport and military papers!

The camp cook shouted "Singe! "just then. "Singe" means "monkey," and is the slang term in the French army for beef stew. We adjourned to the shadow of the cook-tent for the field-rations of a French soldier---hot stew, red wine in tin cups, and brown soldier bread. As we sat eating, reminiscence began to flow, and the mood of the section became plain. They had been through ten days in the hardest corner of the Verdun sector. They had been working all night and every night at a job which involves, as 1 was to learn later, intense concentration and nervous strain. Even by day there was no certain rest. At any time the call "Blessés up the road!" might rout them from sleep. Those day excursions, however, never took them far up the road toward the gory Meuse. You approach the lines with an ambulance only by night, when the aeroplanes and artillery cannot "spot" you.

So the conversation waxed pessimistic. "There's the blamedest place on that road," said one: "whew! the dead horses! One of them's lying half across the road on one side and just past it Barber's car cuts in on the other. There's a shell-hole there, too. You have to do gymnastics to get by without jouncing your blessés. I wonder how many new shell-holes they'll have waiting for us to-night ? '---" I was there when they hit those horses," said another;" you should have heard the poor things ramping and squealing " Then they all came in, strophe and anti-strophe. When I start back from the town, I just take a long breath---all right so far. But next it's that corner where they got the horses, and then it's that corner of wood where there's almost always shrapnel; and then------ "They landed one before the Poste de Secours just after I passed last night. You ought to have heard it on the cobblestones! " "Shrapnel hit the body of the car. When I could get to shelter I took a look inside. The top blessé---he wasn't a bad case---said: 'If you get this all the time I think I'll stay in the trenches.'"" And gas! Two of the fellows were sick for two days with it last week. But I'd rather get the old sophisticatin' than that tear-producing stuff." "And you can't wear a gas-mask and run a car. It fogs, so you don't see the road."

Now all this time the "aerial activity" was going on above that shoulder of earth which screened from view the Mort-Homme. In the intervals of conversation you would look up to note that the little round clouds were swarming thick, here and there. In the foreground, French infantrymen, loaded like pack-mules, were trudging soberly on their way to the front position; and the skylarks kept rising, and singing their hearts out as they rose.

Suddenly, some one called sharply behind me:

"What's that? a signal ?---No, an aeroplane's down!"

From the sky above the horizon, a long, black, inverted-cone of smoke was reaching toward the earth. At its point fell a dark-red flame, whirling like a pinwheel. It passed out of sight behind the rise of the hill; all was over. Close by the base of the cone was another speck, shooting rapidly and at an acute angle toward the earth. We recognized the sharp volplane of a little fighting appareil de chasse. We got the glasses on it; it was a French machine, and the story of this daily war tragedy was complete. The Frenchman had engaged the German in air and brought him down with a machine-gun. The bullets had pierced the petrol-tank or snapped the propeller, probably. When that happens, the machine breaks instantly into fire.

Now a group of us sat down on the grass, smoking and chatting of the close race in the American Baseball League---I had fresh news about that---of the chances in the boat-race, of summer in Paris, and even of politics. We were waiting for the French Lieutenant in charge of the section, who had gone for the night's orders. The Section remarked, in passing, that he was the finest officer in the French army; and the Lieutenant afterwards told me that he had the finest Ambulance section in the world. Plainly no one anticipated those others with any joy; and I, billeted to go out with them and infected with their mood, grew pessimistic myself, indulging in reminiscences of close shaves.

Suddenly, from the door of the sleeping-tent came a sharp American cheer. The rest of the section had gathered about the Lieutenant. "We're relieved, fellows," cried some one as we came running up, "the division is going to the rest station to-night, and we go with them " We cheered too. But the Lieutenant had not finished. "A moment, gentlemen," he said, holding up his hand: "the French section which replaces you to-night is somewhat new to the district. They may need two or three of you as guides. Who will volunteer?"

There was an instant, just an instant, of hesitation. Then a hand went up, then every man of them raised his hand. And I, their fellow-countryman, was proud. Some one, in the joy of the rebound, picked up a baseball. The section scrambled for gloves and hats; and before we pulled out, 'three-old-cat" was going on merrily while the shrapnel-clouds broke and dissipated themselves on the horizon, while the black puffs of exploding shells shot up on the distant hill, while the guns growled everywhere. And a French regiment, trudging seriously on the road to the shell-pits of the forward line, grew suddenly animated as they exchanged speculation on what those curious Americans might be doing.

So we bowled along, through a world of new ruins and shell-pits and complicated military transport, to the next section, where we would be sure to see work that night. And here let me break the narrative to tell about our ambulance men at the front.

There is the American Ambulance at Neuilly, just outside the gates of Paris, the hospital de luxe of the French medical establishment. "Ambulance" is a French word for hospital and an English word for a hospital car; so that the hospital has been somewhat confused in the public mind with the American Ambulance Field Service, which is up at the line, bringing back the freshly wounded from the dressing-stations to the zone of safety. Though the Field Service uses the hospital grounds at Neuilly for a base, the two organizations are separate. Besides this organization, two sections under the Red Cross, known as the Norton and Harjes, operated last summer at Verdun with equal efficiency.

The work began with one little section, and grew as more men volunteered, as more cars came in, and as the French learned that we meant business. By 1916 there were five sections of twenty-five working cars each, incorporated into the French hospital establishment, attached regularly to corps and divisions.

Until May, the sections were scattered from the Vosges mountains---where Hall was killed on Christmas Eve of 1915---to the Somme. Being mostly of the sporting Anglo-Saxon breed, they had gone out for records. Once, an American driver found a captain of the medical staff in great perplexity. "I can't account for those twenty-five blessés," he kept muttering to himself. " Pardon me, sir," said the American, "aren't they the twenty-five we moved down a few minutes ago ? " "Impossible," said the officer.

At another point occurred a bomb raid. The section was asleep when an officer telephoned them to report at the scene of trouble. "Well, well, gentlemen! " said the officer when they arrived, "you have happened in most opportunely. As a matter of fact, I had just telephoned to you. What luck!" "We know it," said the section; "we got your message, and here we are." "You devils of Americans! " said the officer, "you seem to anticipate orders " Indeed, this same section had the honour of being quarrelled over---two rival bodies of French troops wanted it, and wanted it badly.

I shall not let the eagle scream too loudly over all this. The ambulance men would be the last to claim that they are enduring any such chances of death or glory as their countrymen of the Foreign Legion and the Flying Service, or the plain French poilu. All races of men are about equally brave also there is individual efficiency everywhere. But Americans do have, above most races, the qualities of individual speed, of initiative, and perhaps of self-reliance. Moreover, these boys are volunteers, and pioneer volunteers are always the cream of any organization.

Characteristically, they are American university men. Harvard is by all odds the most largely represented. Princeton comes second, with Yale a close third. Some of the members are "just out," and some quit college mid-course to help France. However, there are exceptions. Bartlett admits that he is forty-seven he left villa-life in Italy to help France. So did the mature Emery Pottle. On the other hand, one of them, of whom I shall tell more later, is just out of St. Paul's preparatory school. There is in each corps a director, who runs about in an open car overseeing the job or straightening out tangles, and one or two mechanics who tinker at the bases or make repairs on the road. Most of these mechanicians knew more about Greek roots, when they enlisted in time Ambulance service, than about the inside of a motor-car.

They have grown intimate with the French, whose manners make them easy of approach, and they enjoy immense popularity both with the officers and the plain poilu of the trenches. A general told me with the tears starting in his eyes that no one who had seen them work could help loving America. One night Dodge of Section 8 lost his way. He found himself in the midst of a regiment just from the trenches after a terribly vicious attack. They crowded round him, chattering. Dodge admits that he is a little weak on French and they talked so fast, and with so much trench slang, that he did not understand until one stepped forward to address him in English. ''Monsieur," he said, "my comrades want to shake your hand. We all knew and appreciate what you ambulanciers are doing for us! " So Dodge, a little embarrassed, had to sit there and grasp horny, trigger-calloused hand after horny, powder-marked hand ---a reception under the guns on behalf of the nation and the Ambulance. Let me not go too far with all this. The Americans have only about two hundred working cars on the line, even when the sections are full---which they usually are not, owing to the eccentricities of high explosive shell. The French hospital service as a whole has thousands of cars. But still, our boys are doing their bit.

In early June this work got its recognition. The American service, all seven sections, was gathered up and sent to Verdun, where the running was desperately hard, where to get the wounded out of a sector in which a shell might fall at any time on any spot took not only courage but self-reliance and quick thinking. One and all, the sections admitted to me that any work they ever did before was a holiday beside this.

Now, as we scooted through the long twilight of this Northern latitude, the guns were getting more lively. I noticed that we had begun to enter the wreck of a town, and noticed it only casually. During our run, we had passed so many houses ruined by the old violence of the early German retreat and the new violence of this battle that gaping holes, spattered plaster, outbuildings which rose like gaunt slivers, seemed the normal state of human habitation. But suddenly Andrew said:

"VERDUN!"

It lay bowled out below us; we were in the suburbs. And for an instant, as we shot past, it seemed to me that the stories of ruin had been exaggerated. For a church on a rise near-by still had its steeple ; and farther away the twin towers of the cathedral rose intact. Only this revealed it for what it was---dust. Every street was marked, between the houses, by a streak of grey mist. It was that same dust of ruins which so plagued San Francisco and Messina after their great disasters, here stirred up by such transport as still uses Verdun. We were past the glimpse of the city, we were running down the road, when a bang like a giant firecracker sounded in our ears. That was not in itself so alarming; the guns all about were making far more noise. But a wind seemed to strike us in the face, and at the roadside just ahead a crater of dust and dirt was settling. I never saw a great, high-power car stop so suddenly as we stopped. Our expert at the wheel worked his levers violently and backed out to a cross-roads where he turned into another passage, just as a firecracker sound came from behind us. At top speed, we dashed away from the city of Verdun by another route from that which we had intended to take.

There followed, shortly afterward, a perturbing episode. All the way up from Paris, our left rear wheel had been misbehaving. Near Châlons, it had blown out a tire and burned up an inner tube; and now, at a point just behind a very loud and active battery of big guns, the tire went flat again. The guns boomed and blew every where as we four, all more or less inexpert mechanics, worked jack and levers and pump. Of course we got it in all wrong, and had to begin over again. Piatt Andrew, more learned in the tricks of shells than I---he himself ran an ambulance at the front for six months---listened now and then, and remarked that all was well so far; the noises were "departures," not "arrivals." Arthur Gleason, my companion-reporter, who served his term as a stretcher-bearer at the Yser, agreed with him. The "arrival" has a much slighter if sharper sound, and it is preceded, not followed, by a whistle. We started at last and we had gone scarcely a kilometre when it happened again. This time there were constant arrivals in a field to one side. They seemed to be breaking two or three a minute. Under direction of our cool military driver, snapping out orders in crackling French, we toiled on. At any moment, I thought pessimistically, the Germans might take a notion to shift their fire a little and try out our road. We had half finished when we discovered a flaw in our last spare tube---it was as useless as the rest. So we decided to tighten up, and run on a flat tire. I remember that I, tuning screws with a brace as fast as I could work, dared suggest at this moment that it was what I wanted to do all the time. But to run on a flat tire you must travel a slow pace. We had intended to "make" a certain army headquarters that night, and report officially. This had now become impossible, and we started for the little village where Sections 1 and 8 had their quarters.

By now, we had leisure to look back and behold a spectacle of which we had been getting glimpses all the evening. It was a black, moonless night. To our rear, the Verdun positions were like the edge of a hill-bowl. All along that bowl, illuminating now this glen or hill, now that, something like heat-lightning was playing, flash on flash. At times it lit the whole horizon---a flickering, dancing line of flame. Everywhere, in the nearer distance, light exactly like the impermanent flashings of near-by fireflies were coming-going, coming-going. The heat-lightning was the guns the fireflies were the bursting shells. Along the horizon-line, balls of clear white flame would break out and linger for a minute, revealing whole hill-crests before they died. In he further distance these flares seemed to last longer, I thought ; and they would float in air a full minute. "The German parachute star-lights," explained Andrew. Now and then, a coloured rocket-red or blue or clear white---would streak the darkness and always this was followed by a change in intensity of the guns, or would seem to bring them into action in another quarter. As for the sound, it varied from intermittent roars and whips to a continuous roar. Also, as we crept along, feeling our way on a flat tire and without lights, the big guns would suddenly go off from concealed positions on the roadside, making us jump almost out of our seats, in spite of anything we could do to control ourselves. Summing it all up, however, I can find no more dignified comparison than to a fireworks celebration on a monstrous scale of light and noise. Yet, as we learned later, this was a rather quiet evening, as evenings go about Verdun.

It was nearly midnight when we rounded a dark train of baggage-camions and turned up the black street of a little town. A keen young American face peered out at us from a shaded lantern. Yes, the section was going out just before dawn, he said. What we needed now was sleep. He rummaged round among the blankets. ''Mustn't use blessé blankets for company," he said "sometimes they're infected."

We wrapped ourselves up on stretchers; and next, someone was shaking me. There was no light in the heavens yet and the guns were popping and growling. White, with whom I was going out for the night's crop of wounded at a far embrasure, gave me a gas mask. He warned me not to lose it, and not to take off the blue steel helmet which I had put on as soon as we entered the Verdun sector. We had a drink of hot coffee from a vacuum bottle, and cast off. As we felt our way up the road the guns growled louder and louder. Now we were in full sight of the fireworks display; we were running toward it, into it. Dawn began to struggle on the edge of the sky. It revealed a wooded space before us here and there, the roofs of human habitations showed above the trees even in that light you could see holes gaping against the dim light. All through that wood, great steely fireflies were twinkling.

"Shrapnel," said White in his gentle Irish accent.

"We call that Dead Man's Corner, and we always dread it." A sentry stepped out just then from a sentrybox of solid concrete, and held his gnu horizontally over his head to stop us. He only wanted the pass-word. White whispered it. We shot on, White's neck craned forward, his eyes and hands alert, and drove straight into that wood of twinkling, metallic lights. As a matter of fact, I do not know whether we "got" any shrapnel or no. When the departures are making a lot of noise, the sound of the dangerous arrivals is nearly drowned. You never know unless you have a narrow escape.

Next, we took the rise of a hill; and dawn had really begun to break. Everything came out in quarterlight. As we neared the top of the slope, I was aware that a man had stepped out into the road, was holding up his hand in the posture of a traffic policeman. And another thing happened. Above the hills, quite dimming that edge of dawn on the horizon, a coloured rocket arose and burst.

"I think," said White, "that it's the signal for tir de barrage." He stopped, jammed his brakes down hard. "There's the battery---where the man stands." It was no farther away than the width of a city street.

There must have been another signal of some kind, for suddenly---it burst. A thousand guns, from every hill and glen and meadow about us, went off all together in one great salvo, and continued to go off in one great roar. It was the deadly curtain-fire, by which the French draw a line of death between the enemy and one of their own charges.

The big guns merely boom, like a gigantic blast in a quarry. The little soixante-quinze--- the pride of the French army---booms too; but its sound has also a vicious whip like a rifle's. No instrument of destruction in this war gives such an impression of power. Always, it pierces the chorus of the heavier guns, as the note of the first violin pierces that of an orchestra. And that battery before us was of soixante-quinzes. Their muzzles, outlined against the dawn sky, belched and shook and belched again, as the fire ran from one to another. In the flashes, we could see the crew, working with monotonous rhythm. The curtain fire had lit the whole horizon the blaze seemed to flicker and then to run in great waves.

They say it lasted ten minutes. How long I stood it before I plugged my ears, I do not know. It was not so much the sound-waves bursting against my ear-drums which killed my resolution to hear it through, as a curious irritation which it brought---a feeling that if it kept on longer I must do something violent, I knew not what. Then, with the same suddenness, it stopped. There succeeded not silence, but something like it in the distance, the big guns kept growling as ever---a reluctant continuance of the noise, just as my bull-dog, after a barking fit at a night prowler, will give a series of little, growling barks under his breath. On the cessation of the sound, cylindrical objects began to fly against the dawn-sky from over the muzzles of the guns before us. The battery was throwing out the hundreds of brass projection-cases emptied by the curtain fire.

White cranked up, and we went on, to a plateau and to a house with a great grotesque hole over its front door. It was the Poste de Secours, where we were to get our orders Section 1 clears out two dressing-stations near the front line, and the driver is uncertain of his destination until he receives instructions there. We were going to neither post, it appeared for just as we drew up, a blond, pleasant-appearing little French soldier, with the red cross of a stretcher-bearer on his arm, swung aboard our mud-guard and broke the news that there were grands blessés (heavily wounded men) at a cross-roads on the plateau.

It was getting light now a curve of angry red edged the sky into which we were driving. The ruin of a hamlet, once a suburb of Verdun, shot up a sliver of broken grey stones against this streak of red and the devastated plateau about us, whose very herbage, in the daytime, looks drooping and sick, was now of a gentle violet-grey colour. It was not light enough, however, but that the giant fireflies which were shells still burst out and died. "I've often thought," said White, who left a Montmartre studio to drive an ambulance, "that I'd like to paint all this. I shan't try, though I'd be nervous." Now the workings of another sense destroyed all feeling of beauty raised by this dawn-softened picture of battle. We were running between dead horses. The two nearest were headless and they were all swollen, as a dead horse does swell Nor was that the only smell. Stronger and sharper even, was the stench of chemicals in the air-chemicals from the powder charges of the guns, chemicals from the shells, chemicals from the poisonous gases loosed by the Germans whenever the wind was right. It was these gases which had wilted the herbage.

We were still driving on toward the edge of the plateau ; and I wondered when we were going to stop for across that edge, I well knew, were the shell-holes, which stood for French and German first-line trenches. Suddenly, we saw a soldier ahead waving at us. We drew up. We were at the cross-roads and the wounded, brown army blankets tucked about them, were waiting in the poor cover of the gutters beside the road. Overhead, what had been a system of suburban telephone lines drooped in a grotesque tangle from a cracked and splintered steel pole. The nearest blessé lifted his head. He was a fine-looking blond peasant, about thirty-five years old. He had a pair of very big feet as he lay there, the toes turned out to opposite points of the compass. One leg was bandaged from ankle to hip. When he saw us coming, he raised himself on his elbow, and his yellow beard parted in a smile. The perils of the wounded are not always over when the bearers lift them into the ambulance; but it seems so to them, if they have any capacity for thought left.

They are going back-and alive. "Qu'il fait bon!" (Ah, that's good!) he kept repeating as White, the brancardiers and I lifted him to the top shelf ; and he continued to grin.

The next one, grievously wounded in the body, was past smiles or consciousness of rescue, for the time at least. His eyes were closed, his face was the colour of dirty putty, and he was as plastic to our touch, when we covered him up, as a rag doll.

We finished; and the ambulance behind us, in which Gleason rode as a passenger, moved up for its load. While White backed up, made sure that his tires were tight and cranked the machine, I looked back toward that angry red dawn, now becoming sunrise. There was a dip in the plateau ; through it I could see the country beyond. Nearest of it all, I marked what looked like a field of deep blue, so deep that it was black in spots. Across it ran three bands of morning mist, coloured an unnatural, sickly yellow. I put the glasses on it I could make out no further details, except that the field of dark blue seemed unnaturally humped in places; also, there was a distant roar from that direction. A French soldier noticed me, and perceived that I was new to Verdun. "The German advanced positions," he said briefly. And we were off, running toward the hospital as fast as we dared with four heavily wounded aboard.

At the Poste de Secours a sergeant stopped us again.

Following him, as he stepped out on to the road, came four or five men at a weak, clumsy run. They were all bandaged as to heads or arms. "Nine sitting cases," reported the sergeant briefly, as we drew up. The nearest of them clambered on to the mud-guard beside me and asked if he might go along. White glanced at me, and I got the point. They needed my seat for a sitting case. So I jumped down, as did Gleason, to give way to the wounded and to wait for Townsend, director of the section. He had driven on ahead in his open ear, to the farthest point at which this section operates a boyau or sunken, covered shelter where an ambulance may find safety while it loads. We draw most of our military terms, eventually, from the French---they are so much neater and more definite than ours. So I shall follow them in calling it a boyau. We had been turned aside, as I have said but we knew that when we failed to arrive Townsend would come back. White, as he pulled out, charged us to stop any outgoing ambulance and send it to the cross-roads. Our two cars had not been enough.

I had best not describe that wait too narrowly, lest I write things of use to the enemy. All about us were hills and fields in their full summer richness, yet looking, even to a casual, sweeping glance, curiously dry and unkempt. From the most unexpected places would come the "bang-bang-bang" of a soixante-quinze battery, taking up and dropping the fire. Seldom could I see the guns themselves, so cleverly were they concealed; they betrayed themselves only by the noise and, at most, by a light film of smoke. The fire would seem to ripple all about the fields and lulls, to die out a little, to increase again. Here and there dust would spirt up from the hills or fields, showing that the Germans were replying. I strolled down the road, for no cover was in sight, and one place seemed as safe as another. I came at last to a battery, which betrayed itself to my sight only when the six guns in succession burst against my ear-drums. At the breeches, the crews were passing shells---loading---firing---passing---loading----firing--with the monotonous rhythm of a gymnastic team. Dramatic snap, efficiency, and nervous force infused all their movements. Those little murderers of guns, their spade-feet dug into the earth by the first explosion, shook all over as with uncontrollable passion, quivered to rest, shook again. Two or three men in reserve sat behind the gun-crew, smoking and watching indifferently. A stretcherbearer, sent to the rear on some errand, came clumping along the road and stopped beside me to watch. We joined conversation.

"A German shell hit here last week,'' he said among other things, "and took the head off a man. He was passing shells when he died. The man in reserve pushed his body away, jumped to the caisson and took his place. The battery missed only two shots."

I walked back with him to the Poste de Secours More "sitting cases" had arrived; they crouched weakly against the wall, the lightly wounded smoking, the others seeming to doze. An orderly of the Hospital Corps, holding the end of a bandage expertly between his teeth, was re-dressing a wound. A shell and then two more puffed on a hill near-by, the sound of their explosions lost in the universal roar. By now, what with the hammering at my ear-drums, I was in a curious state of nervous irritation.

Presently, an American ambulance drove up; it was heading toward camp with a load. The driver jumped down, and introduced himself. I had met him last at the Columbia School of Journalism in New York He took a brief breathing-spell---he had been getting it pretty heavily that morning---before, remarking that it was a long way from Morningside Heights, he swung aboard and started on. Just then, Townsend arrived in his open car with news that there was a load in the boyau; and simultaneously two of our cars came up from the base. Gleason and 1 jumped into the open car and we led the way, past the belt of dead horses to the cross-roads.

At about this time, a great black enemy aeroplane came soaring above that notch in the plateau from which we could see the German lines, and the guns opened, as usual, with shrapnel---more shells than I had ever seen fired at one aeroplane. We were watching our stretcher-bearers lift the last of the wounded aboard, when Townsend happened to glance upward. The aeroplane with its frame of little smoke-clouds soared exactly overhead. My first thought was that what goes up must come down; and I felt grateful for my steel helmet. On second thought, I wondered if a steel helmet would stop shrapnel falling from three thousand yards. However, Townsend had another apprehension, more alarming and more sensible.

"That Bosche may be marking for batteries," he said. '' He won't think it worth while to direct a shell at a pair of ambulances---, but we're an open car, and we may be officers, for all he knows. We'd better hurry away."

Yet hurry was only relatively possible on that terrible imitation of a road down which we were driving, what with its ruts and shell-pits. And whenever I looked up, the aeroplane was still a dot at the zenith, and innumerable white anti-aircraft shells were breaking exactly above. But I think we all forgot the aeroplane in time, through our fascinated interest in that road and its environs. For weeks this region had been torn and re-torn by German curtain-fire. Here was a stagesetting for the Inferno. What trees there were had been stripped bare, or broken off at the root, or splintered; yet with the strange vitality of trees the stumps were putting forth little new leaves, which served only to exaggerate their condition. What herbage there was drooped sick from the stalk; and no flower bloomed anywhere. In places, it looked as though a shell had fallen on every square yard of ground, so thick were the pits. Dreadful dunnage lay everywhere---as wrecked motor camions, broken wheels, bones, destroyed kit. There stood a wall---no, it had been a house, for you saw the lower part of a window-frame cutting squarely into the wreck. Beside it lay a dead horse. He had been tied to a post when he got his death-stroke. He lay not on his side, but upright on his knees and hocks. Because he was tied, his head had not dropped. He looked, swollen as he was, like a plump family nag which had fallen asleep.

We were in the mouth of the boyau. It led to one of the famous advanced forts whose sturdy defence saved Verdun and perhaps our world. From a certain shelter peered a company of soldiers. They were caparisoned for action with steel helmets and fixed bayonets. Under the arch of sand-bags and cement, they looked like a company of mediæval pikemen guarding the castle gate.

Outside, a company on some military mission scurried along with their heads down---the attitude and motion of the trapper on the trail. I became aware, then, that shrapnel was bursting not far away. I grow weary of repeating that the guns were going all the time. There was work to do, however---we must prepare the ambulance which had trailed us in for a load of "stretcher cases." Under heavy fire, they sometimes back the ambulance clear into a boyau ; but this did not seem necessary now. As we walked finally to cover, Townsend waved his hand toward a famous military work and said:

"There was a boyau there. One night last week, the big shells outside nearly shook the cars to pieces---actually, we couldn't start one of them until we'd made repairs. Then, when we had our load aboard, we timed the shells. We'd crank up, start the engine, and let her go fast just when the explosion came. We figured to cross the danger zone before the next one arrived. It worked---but if one of us had got stalled in a shellhole, it would have been all off!

There was a deep, black chamber at the foot of the boyau. By the light of a small lamp two field surgeons were working on a scalp-wound---not pretty this one, but not dangerous either. They paused to ask us for news of the world outside, and went on snipping and stitching. I started toward the rear of the chamber. A weak but cheerful voice from the floor yelled in French,

"Step carefully, old man." As my eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, I saw two more stretcher cases, one of them quite inert. A shadow pierced the splash of light at the far door, and a disreputable spotted trench dog, with one white eye, came cringing in. The man who sat under local anaesthetic having his crown stitched, put out a hand and touched him. He jumped as though he had been shot. Like most dogs and cats in the zone of battle, he was a nervous wreck.

We were ready now; and with recurrent scepticism about the efficiency of a steel helmet to stop shrapnel, I helped load up. Townsend and the boyish driver of the ambulance saw first that the wounded were well covered and thoroughly tucked in. That is a cardinal principle, pounded into all Ambulance recruits---keep your wounded warm. A chill on the road to hospital makes sometimes the difference between life and death. The ambulance, driven carefully, weaving in and out to avoid shell-holes, started back over the road along which we had come. We had no need to report at the Poste de Secours, and Townsend proposed a little excursion into the interior of a fort. It is no secret that the Verdun forts, as forts, ceased to exist long before the great battle made that town immortal. When, early in the war, the German Big Bertha guns made fortresses of the old type museum pieces, the French dismantled these masterpieces of the great Vauban, and took the guns away. The Germans, in time, did the expected. Strong positions still, they resemble nothing made by human hands. This one was now merely a great, deep bowl, the bottom littered with powdery dust, with fragments of cement, with twisted steel fragments. Gleason, always eager to take a chance, wanted to climb up the hill-like edge before us and look over at the German positions, but the officer in command, upon being asked permission, vetoed the project---it might draw a shell, he said.

So, still in our open car, we took a short cut across that terrain of hell, straight into Verdun. It was about breakfast-time, when most armies let down a little; the guns on both skies were comparatively quiet, but only comparatively. As for the German aeroplane, it had finished its work and gone.

We entered Verdun through an undamaged street. The blinds and shutters were drawn; it looked simply, on first sight, as though the people had gone away for a summer vacation. On second glance, you saw how nature, the unconquerable, was prevailing over the works of man. For the scarlet poppies which blow in the fields of all Europe, had encroached everywhere on the formal gardens; in places their blossoms lay in banks, as the golden poppy lies on the hills of California. Then we rounded a corner, into a street---what it was before I cannot tell---which was all wrecked. I had been seeing devastated towns for two years off and on, now; but never so great a city so newly ruined. The débris, when it first fell, had blocked the street. A road for automobiles had been shovelled through, its borders guarded by neat walls of piled rock; in places the bank of dust, of burned wood, of shattered stones, of twisted iron, rose as high as our seats. The buildings on both sides were so nearly effaced that they lacked even those pathetic little signs of former human habitation which one so often sees amid other ruins, as a bed in the intact corner of a broken second story, a picture on an exposed wall, a kitchen stove with the tea-kettle still on it. White, however, pointed toward a side street "Down there's a nursery," he said, "with the front blown off. The toys are just as the children left them---a hobbyhorse, a Teddy-bear, a big doll-house, and all that. Border of little rabbits and kittens round the wallpaper---you know how they fix up nurseries. And over there "---he pointed in another direction---"a shell has torn down the walls of a house and just pulverized everything in it---except one thing. There was a big statue of Napoleon in the hall. It hasn't been touched, and it stands with its arms folded, facing North and defying the Germans.

The cathedral rose above us with its twin Gothic towers unscarred; it seemed quite intact, until we rounded it and saw where a fortuitous shell had broken off a piece of the apse-wall. However, a week or so later, news came to me in Paris that the Germans had opened directly on the cathedral, and were reducing it to the universal ruin. There could he no accident about that; the cathedral is too prominent and the German fire too well directed. I wondered then if this were not a sign that they had abandoned hope of taking Verdun. They spared the Cloth Hall at Ypres until the British checked them. The day after the battle of Ypres was decided, they reduced to junk that glory of old French Flanders.

So it has gone on other sectors of the line. In your Prussian officer is a wide streak of bad boy.

So without further incident, except a thousand explosions on our right and left and rear, we came home to camp for coffee and brown broad.

PIATT ANDREW and that eminent French gentleman who acted as our guide and chauffeur turned in after breakfast; old stagers, they got their rest when they could. Gleason and I, recalling that we were in the greatest battle of the world, and that every moment was an experience, fought our drowsiness with black coffee and tobacco. We were near a main line to Verdun. All the morning, sober, determined French regiments, casques on head, packs on shoulder, gasmasks at belt, swung past us with their easy route-step toward the belt of shell-holes beyond Verdun. On another road, the transport, the perfect motor-organization which saved Verdun to France, rolled monotonously forward.

Earlier in the battle, I had travelled for a week or so about the rear of the Verdun army. Then, as now, I admired nothing the French did so much as this transport. The full story of its impromptu organization, rendered necessary when the German fire began to command the railroad, may not be told until after the war. It needed no expert military eye, however, to appreciate its efficiency. I have stood for hours and watched the great camions, twenty seconds apart, flash regularly through a village. Never once was the line halted or broken. I have seen trains of country omnibuses, spilling over with helmeted troops, moved with the same regularity and order. Efficiency---I thought again of my Florentine captain in the Alps. Genius can always beat the machine-like efficiency of mediocrity. The French, like the Italians, have that quality---usually latent, perhaps, but bursting forth in emergency.

My wakefulness was rewarded that morning when a chance offered to go forward with a high medical officer on a trip of inspection. We passed again that "Dead Man's Corner" where the shrapnel had made at dawn a flock of gigantic fireflies. The shrapnel was popping there still as we ran into the trees, only now the bursting shells were white, puffy clouds from which fell a gorgeous trailer of greenish gold. A corner of Verdun emerged from the thin screen of forest-hedges now merely unkempt, now levelled into brush-heaps, houses now merely closed, now roofless or ruined. In the distance stood the waiting-shed of a suburban tramway line. Three of its walls had been shot away. The fourth still held, and from it the roof, intact, swayed downward to the earth. Somewhere on that journey, whose memories come back to me confused, we skirted a field which was banging, banging continually with hidden batteries, yet which revealed not even the muzzle of a gun. Somewhere, again, holes like the mouth of a mine-tunnel ran into a hill. Bearers were emerging in pairs, carrying between them covered forms of the wounded, At last we drew up at a structure crazy with shell-made gaps in walls, roof and foundations.

Within, the wounded lay sprawled out on an earthen floor. There seemed no orderly arrangement. They looked to me, on first glance, like flies which, overcome by some fumigator's vapour, had dropped dead on a table. Here, two surgeons worked with accurate speed on an emergency dressing. Here, a soldier-priest, a stole thrown over the collar of his uniform, was giving the last rites. Here, one drew his breath in long, struggling gasps. Here one bit his lips to keep back his moans. For the rest, they lay perfectly quiet, as though saving all energy for the struggle of healing.

When the officer my companion had received a report, given a few directions, criticized one or two details, he suggested a visit of courtesy to a certain artillery general. Our way, when finally we left the motor-car, led to a set of artificial caves in a bank. Somewhere above, gigantic guns were roaring with beats and rests like music. From the nearest cave, in the intervals of the explosions, came a sound of chanting. I glanced within. A priest was saying Mass at a tiny altar, a uniformed soldier his acolyte. The cave was packed with kneeling figures in light blue. But near the door were two in greenish-grey who held between their hands, as they knelt, the little fatigue-caps of the German Army. Newly made prisoners, these; their guards to right and left had brought their rifles even to Mass.

The General of Artillery looked his army and his craft. He was a tall man in the effective forties, his face all intellectual fineness and power, as of a scholar transformed into a warrior. He met me with that little pose of formality which the Frenchman in any official position feels it his duty to assume at a first meeting. In measured terms he expressed his gratitude and that of France for our ambulances, Then, relaxing, he invited us inside for a bottle of wine. His headquarters made a little fortress of earth and sandbags. A long table nearly filled it; and this, except for the corner where we drank our champagne, was set forth with ordered piles of maps, diagrams, note-books, technical treatises and sheets covered with mathematical formulæ. This general and his surroundings expressed to the eye what artillery work means in this war--exact, subtle science, developed and applied under conditions of appalling danger, hardship, and nervous distraction.

His big guns---"my bass viols" he called them---were going in orderly rhythm during all our conversation. Their salvos rattled the window-frames, seemed even to shake that inert masonry of war, the sand-bags. He had been at Verdun since the first great attack; he showed it by the lines of sleeplessness in his face. Yet when I advanced a timid, layman's opinion that the worst of it might be over, he gave me a jovial look full of French cynicism and said that he doubted it. Subalterns came in presently, with reports. While he read them, dismissing each with a quick, decisive word, he cocked his head to listen, a new salvo rattled even the glasses on the table, he seemed to catch something wrong or at least unusual in the music of his orchestra out there. He called his adjutant, put a quick question or so, and reached for his cap. Reading our dismissal in this, we withdrew and returned along a road of a thousand near explosions to the ambulance camp, from which the sound was only a confused, general roar.

We witnessed, that day, another tragedy of the air. Having gone afield with the men of Section 8, we were resting in a garden, where a few French soldiers joined us. In the near-by heavens swung a line of military balloons. The day was bright, but banks of puffy cumulus clouds were gathering about the edges of the sky. One of these, I noted indifferently, had swelled out until it seemed almost to touch the nearest balloon.

Suddenly we heard the rip and rattle of a machinegun. We were puzzled for a moment, because this was far behind all infantry action. Then some Frenchmen cried, "The sky!" and we were aware that the firing came from the cloud. Everyone ran through a hedge-gate to find a better point of observation. I retain a vision of Pinard, the camp puppy, as he raced after us dragging in his mouth a piece of clothes-line with which he happened to be playing and only aware, in his little dog-mind, that here was excitement and that his people were going somewhere.

The firing appeared to come from within the cloud; and at first we could see no aeroplane. However, the anti-aircraft guns were going. About the big cloud clustered a flock of little new ones, as though it were spawning. Then, from its farther edge emerged an aeroplane which we recognised as German; it volplaned sharply, but under control, down toward the German lines. "They have driven it off," we said to ourselves. Indeed, the French seemed to think this also, for the gun-fire stopped.

It was only one of those ruses at which the Germans are so clever. As we started to turn away, a great black German aeroplane burst out of the cloud; with the dart and swoop of a hawk, it came straight toward the balloon. Its machine-gun rattled, stopped, rattled, stopped; it passed the balloon broadside-on, it shot back into the cloud. The balloon-crew below had evidently begun to wind up the cable as soon as the aeroplane appeared. The balloon started to descend.

Even after the German disappeared, it seemed untouched. Then we saw its nose rise lazily toward the heavens and suddenly it shot out a burst of flame. Down it came, its summit blazing, its lower surfaces untouched, falling rapidly and still more rapidly. A speck fell before it.

"They've cast off the parachute! " I cried, all judgment gone, what with excitement and hope. But the nearest French soldier turned on me a face all tragic stress.

"But no! monsieur," he said, "that is the basket---God, my God! " For it was down now. The slope of a little hill concealed the finale of this tragedy from our eyes which made it only the more terrible in imagination.

That was not quite the end of the episode, however. We learned the rest late that afternoon, when we visited Section 2 in a town back among the hospitals and the rest stations. An hour after the fight, it appeared, the German machine had returned with a companion to repeat the trick, or a variation. This time the French, being prepared, had brought them both down with anti-aircraft guns.

Section 2 was doing "jitney work," they said---merely shifting patients from hospital to hospital. Being near the end of their rest period, they appeared as eager for active work as the weary, battered Section 3 had seemed eager for rest.

They received the Croix de Guerre as a body, mostly for gallantry at Pont-à-Mousson, where, with the house above them going down under a shell-shower, they got out the wounded nevertheless. Also, they were at Bar-le-Duc when the German aeroplanes made their first big raid on the town. The Section was sitting down to luncheon just as the bombs began to burst. Without orders, they rushed out, cranked up, and ran into the worst of it. Barclay had a hole shot clean through the hood of his car. Graham drove up to a tangle of wounded, dying women and children---one item was a baby with its arms blown off. To make room, he pulled out his blessé-blankets and threw them on the ground. When he had loaded up, he hesitated, wondering if he had not better search a freshly-ruined house at one side. He made up his mind, luckily for him and his wounded, that his load was large enough, and drove on to the hospital. When he returned, he found his blankets peppered like a sieve with shrapnel. Besides the general decoration, eight members of that section have received individually the Cross of War.

We found Section 4 encamped in the ruins of a town partially burned by the Germans in the Retreat from the Marne. They were farther back than the other three sections then on active service, and less likely to receive the visit of a chance shell; at this camp the noise of Verdun varied from a distant rumble on the horizon to a sense of unease out there to the North. They seemed, however, insufficiently grateful for that. They were approaching the end of their period at the rest-station ; the past week had been full of ticklish work and narrow escapes from shells or whiffs of poison gas. Though they had experienced better luck than Section 3, which had scored three wounded, they had taken no fewer chances. Pessimistically, they explained that theirs was a damnable run---more than thirty-five kilometres, which is nearly twenty-five miles. They started so as to get into the most dangerous zone just at dark; they must get out of it before the early daylight of these short midsummer nights. And sometimes, when the work was heavy out there, they had to make two trips. One of their cars was always on wait-a twenty-four hour turn---at the first Poste de Secours, from which they got their orders.

Their task was to clean out wounded from two boyaux on the edge of the trenches behind the famous positions of Cumières and the Mort-Homme. Perry, the director of this section, said that he would send one of us on each of the two trips. Of what I shall call Position One, he said "it is the sportier. But the other," he added, "is more interesting." Gleason and I were trying to decide which should be the sport and which the artist, when Perry and Andrew settled it between them. Gleason was to have the "sporty" one, and I the interesting one. From the lay of the land, as Rockwell traced it out for me on the map, I should have called my detail "sporty" also. I had mounted the seat beside the driver, had seen, by advice, that my steel helmet fitted and that my gas-mask hung firmly to my belt, before I noticed who was to be my driver. The men go out by rote; and I had drawn Kid Allen.

Now I had met the Kid three weeks before, in a town just beyond the guns of the Argonne. I found him sitting in his car, reading a newspaper and waiting for the section mail. He had not shaved for some time, it appeared, but that made small difference; you looked twice before you saw three downy hairs. He remarked to us, then, upon recognizing our accent, that the sections were shifting to Verdun and expected a great deal doing; and he said it in the unformed but confident voice of a boy become a soldier, The Kid had been nine months in the Ambulance service since he left St. Paul's School. He expects to enter Harvard next autumn; and he admits to seventeen summers.

I wish I might tell all about that drive with the Kid hut the censorship and consideration for the safety of both French soldiers and American ambulance-men make it necessary to be hazy. There was first the long run through a perfect European evening. Night the Healer had blotted out the uglier scars of war, except now and then when we crossed the villages. Even these looked, in the dimming light, like old ruins---so old that no one could mourn over them and the lives that once they framed. We drove on into the world of heat-lightning and giant fireflies ; we saw the horizon now flickering, now laced by the fireworks of signal rockets and flares. The Kid, regarding this lurid landscape expertly, remarked that it looked to him like a fairly quiet night. It was time, he added; the last week had been pretty tough.

We ran into a town. All the doors of the houses which remained were framed and roofed with sand-bags. This was the place where many men had been killed by shells a few days before, and where one reserve ambulance of the American Section keeps always a twenty-four hour watch. Our reserve driver peered out from between two piles of sand-bags as we descended, and remarked that we might as well do our waiting in the abri (bombproof) ; by the law of chances, the more you stayed in bomb-proofs, the longer you were getting hit. We followed him. We were in the first story of a stout house, timbered like a mine, its walls and ceilings all sand-bags or cement. French soldiers, either stretcher-bearers or messengers, lolled about the bunks reading, smoking or dozing. A sergeant poked in his head. Addressing us as "Messieurs,'' he issued orders. It was indeed a quiet night. There were no wounded for the present at the Poste to which we were going. We must wait there until two o'clock; if nothing arrived by then, we might start home empty.

Now, as we drove on into the fireworks, the Kid began to show his technique. We were running, of course, without lights---no vehicle ever uses a light, even the dimmest "trailer," in the zone of operations. He had been dropping his little "peace car'' into shell-holes, and drawing it delicately out again, all the way up to the Poste de Secours. The holes multiplied. The Kid, however, had learned the road in a week. "Now we're coming to some bad ones," he would say, and an instant later he would have that little tin car dodging like a dancer. The dark traffic multiplied itself along the road. Always, before I could make out anything in the darkness, his sharp young eyes would spot a heavy camion or a man ; and he would toot his horn respectfully. An ambulance has the right of way over all classes of traffic except three---reinforcements, ammunition transport going forward, and food transport going forward. There was no telling when we might be encountering a vehicle of this privileged class hence the respectful tone of the horn, and, when we came so near the enemy that horns were as dangerous as lights, of his voice. He pleaded with gentle suppliance, did the Kid at this stage of the run, imploring messieurs the chauffeurs of the army camions to give a poor little ambulance room.

Once he said

"That's a big one went off then. Hold to your seat. She's timed to do it again just as we pass her." She did ; the noise of her deafened me for a moment, and the blow of her was like running into a door in the dark. Twice, whole batteries opened on heights above us; and the Kid remarked that only a few nights before, in that very district, he had passed by while both sides were doing curtain-fire. "Over me---that was lucky," he said. There was a stretch of road so picturesquely lonely, as we saw it in the flashes of the guns, that I should like to describe it with details, but shall not. Once we caught a glimpse of a black terrain not so very far away which seemed, under the gun-flashes and the starlight, like a field newly ploughed ; it looked sinister and disturbed. It was the locked lines, French and German. There were no trenches any more in that field, only shell-holes, where, sometimes, friend and enemy lay inextricably mixed. We had a swift night-vision of a ruined farmhouse. Only a sliver, like a toothpick rock, was left of a corner-wall, and it made a black slit against the far glare of twinkling batteries, flares, all the night fireworks going on along on active trench-line. Once a searchlight showed us a bank, sloping with mathematical accuracy---a German field fort across the river. And everywhere, as we looked to right, to left, forward and back, the great fireflies twinkled.

By and by we turned into a town, bumping from a shell-hole as we crawled down the narrow passage of a back alley.

"Here we are " remarked the Kid.

There was no light except the stars and the faint glow of battle, but I made out doorways fringed with sandbags. I jumped down, and started to light a cigarette. instantly the Kid and three French soldiers threw themselves upon me; a hand struck down the match, and a foot extinguished it. I passed a half-minute of unpopularity. We were very near the enemy, it appeared---how near I am not telling. A light like that might bring a shell, or worse. I waited while the Kid stowed his car, ready to take my medicine with him and the sentry in case my "break " brought trouble, But nothing happened.

We had the latest Paris newspapers. Rockwell, who threw them aboard after us when we started, had warned us not to give them all to the officers. Further, we brought joyous news, not yet in print, Information of decisive military movements, even among one's Allies, reaches the region of Army Headquarters sooner than it reaches the public press. Great things for us had just come off both in Galicia and the West. We burst into the officers' abri with the news, and started a pleasant French excitement, which died away only when each man crowded round the Petit Parisien, laid out under a dim whale-oil lamp on a map-table, to read the particulars for himself.

In the men's abri, where our wounded were coming---if we got any---we created even more bubble and splutter. There were bunks and chairs in this men's abri; and being Frenchmen, they offered us the chairs while they crowded standing round their little lamp, one reading out loud, the others punctuating the formal communiqués and the remarks of "our military expert" with exclamatives of pure joy. They were just miscellaneous Frenchmen these; but for their surroundings of sandbags and blessé-bunks and their soldier clothes, a chance group such as you might meet anywhere in a provincial café. Indeed, that is true of the whole French army now; it is not the least endearing thing about the poilu. Gone, for the most part, is the military class with its unmistakable brand. Officer and soldier alike, they look like bakers, farmers, mechanics, lawyers, or business men who just happen to be in uniform. Externally, the soldier-mark goes no deeper than the linings of their horizon-blue tunics. Internally, of course, they are as determined and expert an army of fighters as the world ever saw. Were this not so, we should not have sat there that night, beyond Verdun. But one likes it that they appear civilian Frenchmen through everything.

The canvas over the door lifted, and a slight, sprightly young Frenchman, trench-helmet on head, gas-mask at belt, came down the steps and, greeting the company with "good evening," began at once to pour out a tale to the Kid. He was a driver of the regular French ambulance, come up with a big car for "sitting cases." I translate his remarks from his argot to ours.

"Say, ain't it the limit! They've just handed a cross of war to one of the biggest fat-heads in the next section to ours. He got under shell-fire, and ducked into an abri until it was over. When it stopped and he came out of his hole, he found a big dent in his car. Now they hang a decoration on him for gallantly running through artillery fire. Fan me, Kid, fan me!"

Whereupon the group about the lamp, having satisfied themselves that the good news was really true, came into the conversation. One stretcher-bearer who looked to me like a small town tradesman remarked that it was probably "pull." Pull, he said, went a long way, especially in his neck of the woods. (I'm still translating from argot to argot.) Another, who spoke with what I took to he the accent of the South. asked him where his town had it on any other town in that respect.

Then conversation grew general. They asked if we thought the pressure was going to let up on Verdun now. When we said we did, they remarked that it was time; some one else ought to be standing it for a while. Taking me, from my khaki and trench helmet, for a newly arrived American ambulancier, they asked if this man "Uggs" who had just been nominated by the "Parti Républicain," was controlled by the Germans ? Also, was it true that the Germans had all the money in America ? I set them right, and they assumed, at least, to believe me. They asked about the skyscrapers, and wanted to know whether we talked the same language as the English or only a language resembling it. I was puzzled to find a reply for that question!

Presently---it was past midnight now---conversation lagged and everyone began to doze. The quick blessed sleep of youth caught both the Kid and his French confrère. They rolled up on the bunks into kitten-like balls. Myself, I did not sleep ; for all through the talk I had been noting firecracker-sounds---shrapnel unquestionably---outside. The Germans were doing a little perfunctory shelling, as they probably did every night. Then came noises which drowned this. Off in that direction where lay the Mort-Homme a machine-gun. then many machine-guns, began to drum. The batteries started into louder activity---the boom of the big pieces, the exaggerated rifle-whip of the soixante-quinze. However, sleep began to catch me too just as I was dropping off, a voice called at the door of the abri

"Lift the curtain, Messieurs---the curtain!"

I sprang up and lifted it. There appeared a stretcherbearer, the end of a stretcher, a pair of inert feet. Immediately the whole abri woke to that animation that lively human fuss, with which the French do everything. He wasn't badly wounded, it seemed, as wounds go in this war---only a torn thigh. I take it. He rose up on his elbow, grinning his relief, and asked for a cigarette.

For he had just come along a dangerous way, on which many a man who starts lightly wounded is heavily wounded before he arrives, and many a man heavily wounded is cured for ever of all his ills. When somehow, they have got out of the shell-holes, the stretcher-bearers pick them up. The French have little two-wheeled carts for conveying the wreckage of battle. They cannot be used at this point, however; the ruins of field and house are too rough. The bearers carry the stretchers on their shoulders to a certain road, which may be swept at any time. There, they transfer their wounded to the carts and dash across to the next shelter. These men in the abri, these plain Frenchmen in soldier clothes with whom I had been talking politics and pull, are among the heroes of the Verdun sector. They have lost as heavily as many regiments which carry emblazoned on their banners the names of famous battles.

The curtain was lifted again. We had another case ---this looked like a bad one. There seemed but little life in him; and we could not wonder when we learned that he had just been through an emergency operation. The Kid looked him over, and asked if he were in danger. The bearers answered that the surgeons said no; only he'd better be handled carefully.

Next arrived three "walking cases," all with their arms in slings. The first one flopped down beside me---a little Frenchman with brown, bright eyes. He accepted a cigarette, and showed a disposition to talk.

Just think how lucky he was, he said. He had been wounded late in the evening, when he could crawl out immediately, and behold! It was only a flesh wound, too---a machine-gun bullet through the top of his shoulder, which came out of his back! He'd walked all the way.

But look what I got en route," he said. The steel brim of his trench-helmet was pierced by a neatly drilled little hole. Now, he inquired, when would he get out of here ? I assured him that a big ambulance was waiting for sitting cases, and would start before dawn ; also that the road seemed all safe when I came up. Relieved, he remarked on the flavour of the cigarette I had given him---a popular American brand which can be bought in Paris. "It's an American cigarette, Turkish type," I said, "How much do they cost in America ? he asked. "A franc a box of ten." "Mon Dieu!" he exclaimed, "you rich devils of Americans!"

A head poked itself through the door to announce that another stretcher-case was coming. That made a full load for us. The Kid began to tuck in his wounded; I helped, or tried to help, load them. As I ran back for the second, I forgot to lower my head, and took from the timbering of the abri such a blow on the crown as would have made me a stretcher-case myself but for the steel helmet. As it was, I got neither shock nor bruise. I found at Verdun that there are many and diverse uses for this newest and oldest device of protective warfare. Plug up the ventilation-hole at the top, and it becomes at once a wash-bowl. Carried by its chin-strap, it is a satisfactory basket. It is the perfect rain-hat. Finally, as I learned then, it pays for its keep in protecting you when you have to take cover. You need never mind your head.

As we started, a set of great German searchlights were sweeping back and forth against the zenith of the sky, hunting, I suppose, for night-wandering aeroplanes.

"They're all right where they are," remarked the Kid, "only sometimes they drop down and look you over till they read the red cross on your side. Usually they let you go but I've known them to send over a shell or so." However, the searchlights swept only from the zenith to Orion, dimming his belt.

With a load of wounded aboard, the time had come for the Kid to show his technique. Gentle and considerate carriage between abri and hospital may mean a life saved. A violent bump will sometimes tear open a new wound. He ran at a snail's pace over the shell-pitted sections, weaving his agile little car in and out. Once only did we get a bump; I could feel the handles of a stretcher bound behind me, and I heard a composite grunt from within.

"Darn! " said the Kid, "that must be a new one!" It was the only time he had spoken to me for a quarter of an hour; he was strictly business now.

The traffic was all going back, but at a slow pace; we had the speed on anything which travelled that road. Also, by the rule I have quoted before, our ambulance, carrying wounded, had now absolutely the right of way. Gone was the politely apologetic tone of the Kid. he was lord of that road, and he proposed to enforce his right. At first he did not use his horn, but only his voice. A train of great, heavy camions would make a deeper blotch in the blackness.

"A droite !" (to the right), the Kid would sing out in a voice all alarm and authority. "A droite-- -à droite!"

"---à droite !" I would hear the drivers shouting down the line, their singsong growing fainter and fainter. Once we made out a line of camions drawn up by the roadside. They towered above as, immobile. Something might have happened there. Our little Ford came only half-way up to the tops of their gigantic bodies. The Kid curved his machine delicately about them, to take a look. The motion, somehow, struck me as indescribably comic. It seemed like a little boy who runs hall-way round a big man, looks him over impudently, and passes on his way.

We could use the horn by now, for we were once more amidst the bellowing of near-by artillery; and I discovered that the Kid could put more profanity into a siren automobile horn than any other driver I ever saw. "A droite !" he would yell, and follow up with a series of loud 'blank-blank-blanks,' on the horn.

Usually camions or cook-wagons began at once to shift lazily toward the gutter, but there was an independent driver here and there, who held tight to the right of way. One field kitchen, in especial, pretended not to hear and blocked a bridge before us. Just then, also, came the firecracker sound, through. the booming of our own artillery, which proclaimed "arrivals'' not far away.

"To the right, sacred kind of an onion ---to the right, species of a pig " bellowed the Kid in approved French army profanity. The field kitchen curved sullenly to one side as it cleared the bridge, and the driver, leaning forth, replied in the voice and vocabulary of a Paris cabman.

Now, at last, our own guns belched no more beside our road and the twinkling, firefly lights were all behind us. Through the smell of chemical and animal mortality which hangs over all those blasted fields, there pierced a fresh scent to which we, the jungle-sprung, remain still sensitive after æons of evolution---the breath of dawn. The horizon-edge lightened a little. Just then, something happened which made us both jump and then settle down with a laugh. Two fireflies ---real ones---had twinkled beside the road; and they looked to us both exactly like shrapnel.

We could talk, now. I offered the Kid a cigarette, but he refused. "I tried it a little last December," he said, "but then I swore off, I don't think it's good to smoke until you get your growth. But it's funny how every smoker goes right to his cigarette when he's scared, isn't it? Say, what happens to you when you're scared ?"

"My mouth and tongue get dry as a bone," said I.

"My knees wabble." The Kid, observe, was enough of an experienced soldier to understand perfectly that the fearless man is mostly a myth. "It helps a lot to have an American round to josh with, doesn't it? I remember that once Southwell and I got into a hot place. A shell dropped ahead of us and another behind, and the road was blocked. When you feel you can't get out---that's toughest of all. We hadn't any wounded, so we could leave the cars. We ducked into an abri. We were both awful scared. Southwell came in all hunched up. When we got inside, Southwell threw out his chest and said 'I'll show these Frenchmen that an American citizen is not afraid of a little shell. That made me laugh, and I wasn't scared any more."

Then the Kid felt into reminiscences of old days with the ambulance before they shifted to Verdun. He told of the tricks of shell-dodging; how you get a sense for the rhythm of a bombardment and learn to run over dangerous ground between this arrival and the next. He praised the French poilu, his good fellowship and his gratitude. Finally be brought up a story which I had heard many times before among the ambulance sections---the strange ride of Charlie Toms.

Toms, who has been in ambulance work ever since the lines locked on the Yser, is now mechanician for Section 4. It is his business to repair the ambulances whenever and wherever they go bad. During the very hottest days of Verdun a car broke its axle. Toms brought up a spare axle on another ambulance, which had started forward for wounded. Just as he got to work, the Germans began to shell the position. Working fast and feverishly, he made repairs. He took the wheel and started the car. It began to back up. He realized at once his mistake. He had put in the differentials backward

The car could not be abandoned, because it had a load of wounded. And the shells began to come nearer. Doubtless the average European would have heroically rechanged that axle under fire. But Toms is all American.

"Boys," he said, "we've got to run this blame car home backwards!"

He stood facing the body, and worked the steering wheel with his hands behind his back. He put his assistant on the step to man the gas and the brake. The horn had been shot to pieces therefore the regular driver stood on a rear mud-guard to blow a whistle and curse camions out of the way. So they ran for twenty miles, the French army gaping or laughing at them as they passed. But they got their wounded back unhurt.

Dawn had broken as we drew up beside the tent hospital. Forbes, on post there, ran out to assist with the unloading. In passing he recalled to me that we had met when he was Sunday Editor of the Boston Herald. The bearers drew out the loaded stretchers from the shelves. What with the benevolent toxin that follows wounds, what with the relief of rescue, our blessés were all asleep. Only one stirred as we lifted him out; he was the "leg case" who had grinned so cheerfully when he landed in the abri. He looked over toward the Kid and held out a grimy, calloused hand.

"Thank you, my comrade," he said.

The Kid had found a soft tire. He fell to rummaging through his tool-box for jack and pump.

"What sort of a run did you have?" asked Forbes.

"Quiet night," said the Kid, kicking his jack under the axle. "Nothing doing---pos-i-tively not a thing!"

They told the United States Consul of the great French hospital-town that they had a wounded American in No. 16 ; so the Consul drifted over, on his first spare afternoon, to see what he could do. At the hospital, they referred him to Bed 10, Row 2, Ward 4, where he found the wounded man asleep, the blankets drawn up over his head. The Consul touched him.

"Who dah ?" exploded a voice from beneath the blankets. Off came the cover, revealing a comely black head and a row of teeth like new gravestones.

"Why, you or'nerry, no-account black hound" exploded the Consul affectionately, "what the blazes are you doing here?"

"Fo' the lawd's sake, Man," said the wounded American with surprise and gratitude. "You's from de Sout', ain't you?"

When, a little later, First-class Private Eugene so-and-so, of the this-or-that infantry regiment, grew convalescent, he used to get leave as often as he could so that he might hobble into town on his crutches and visit the Consul. I also was a persistent visitor at the Consulate; and so on many an afternoon we three---Southerner, Southern negro and Northerner---sat and talked war. A year and a half at the front had made a strange creature of Private 'Gene. He was, to begin with, a great, young black Hercules, a monument of trained muscle----when the war broke he had been making his living in England by boxing and foot-racing. But he wasn't at all the negro we know in America. War and heroism had given him that straight air of authority common to all soldiers at the line. He looked you in the eye, and answered you with replies which carried their own conviction of truth. The democracy of the French army had brushed off on to him; he had grown accustomed to looking on white men as equals. His race, they say, has a talent for spoken languages.

Already there was a trace of French accent in his rich, Southern negro speech and when he grew excited he would fall into French phrases.

He held a machine-gun during the first terrible days of the Verdun battle, when the Brandenburgers were fighting for Fort Douaumont. For something he did there, a matter of going to the rescue of wounded under fire, he had been mentioned in orders, which is the first step toward the Croix de Guerre. He was going to work hard for that decoration when they sent him back, he told us.

He had fought at Arras ; he had been in the charges for Notre Dame de Lorette; he had been wounded in the blasted terrain of Champagne. But all memories of those glorious and horrible old actions seemed to have been dimmed by that terrific fighting at Verdun, and especially by that day when his company hold off a German charge until man could hold no more---until he knew the red rage and the hot sickness of butchery. He described that day in detail with a wealth of picturesque negro phrasing and flashes of negro wit, which no Northerner could possibly transcribe from memory. They expected the charge that day, and so they cleaned guns, got even-thing ship-shape, and had a good dinner of "singe" and biscuits. "If I eat much more of that stuff," said Private 'Gene, "I certainly will climb trees." And then the German charge commenced. He described it not as a run, but as a steady walk---a great crowd of men in grey coming smoothly on. His company had a nervous little sergeant, who was nevertheless willing to take advice, Private 'Gene said. He danced up and down, yelling "Feu!" before the Germans got within proper killing range. But the experienced gunners cajoled him, "joshed" him, until the enemy were massed 200 yards away. And here the narrative of Private 'Gene---I have heard him tell it several times---always grew confused, dropped into a sing-song at intervals, and flashed back and forth between French and English. "Première pièce---feu! Deuxième pièce---feu! Rat-a-tat tat-tat tat-tat! " he would say, imitating both the sergeant and the guns. "it was like mowing grass, boss, only the grass grew n'as fast as you mowed it. When they got a little start on us and you could rightly see them, they was coming on by fours---four here, four there---toujours quatre, toujours quatre ! You'd mow them down, and four more would lie in their places. You'd look again, and one or two would be 'way forward. You'd slue the gun around and get them, and four more would be just where you'd fired before, but nearer---and you'd mow them down. Toujours quatre-toujours quatre! If you hadn't seen the dead where you'd piled 'em you'd 'a' got plum disheartened. When you stopped to cool, and the other gun picked up the feu, you could see 'em wriggling like worms in the bait-box.

"Yassir, I was sick, awful sick. Every time the sergeant yelled 'Feu!' I got sicker and sicker. They was Germans, but they had wives and children, hadn't they?"

An afternoon, during which the drama was repeated again and again; and then they had to abandon the trench---a matter of a military accident, which need not be recorded here, Private 'Gene destroyed his machinegun. "There's a place where you can do it with your hand," he said, "but not if your hand is fumbly, an' I sho' was fumbly." So he opened the breech and kicked it until he destroyed the mechanism. Then it was a confused flight, dodging from shell-hole to shellhole, until he reached cover of a trench. From his first shell-hole he killed a German, a patrol going to certain death in order to find the French. He was making, gun in hand, straight for the shell-hole where Private 'Gene crouched alone, when that superb piece of black flesh rose straight up before him, got in the first shot, and pumped two bullets into his chest. Private 'Gene remembers mainly the look of surprise which the German had on his face when he died: "I bet he thought he saw the debbil " he said.

That night he slept in a house with stragglers of two or three regiments, waiting to join their commands in the morning. " Whang! I woke up: my ears was splitting and the blood was on my face." A shell had reached them. It blew two men to pieces. It wounded nearly all the others. A captain, himself wounded, flew about doing what he could. But they needed the medical corps brancardiers, and Private 'Gene, after stopping his own little face-wound, went back through the outskirts of Verdun, crumbling under bombardment, to get them. For that, he received his mention in orders---" Private Eugene -----, for obtaining help for wounded comrades under heavy fire while himself wounded," he used to recite in French from the Order of the Day. He couldn't tell us much about that trip---he was too dazed, I suppose. But next morning, his wound having proved slight, he went back to the line. From this new trench he could glimpse the Brandenburger charges up the slopes of Fort Douaumont. It was a steep slope, he said, so that a wounded man could not keep his feet. The dead and wounded, as the machine-guns caught them, rolled back into the heap which was growing in Douaumont Ravine. Three days of this, and a shell fragment came, slitting his thigh. They got him out that night, in the midst of a bombardment which shook the ambulance like jelly.

The last time I heard him tell his story of Verdun, Private 'Gene paused at the end as though trying to sum it all up.

"You wouldn't 'a' believed it, boss, if you'd seen it in a cinema show!" he said at length.