s.

It was February 27. Between ten and eleven at night we arrived at a
hospital installed in some wooden sheds, and feverishly busy. We were at
B----, a miserable village on which next day the Germans launched some
thirty monster-shells, yet failed to kill so much as a mouse.

The night was spent on straw, to the stentorian snores of fifty men
overcome by fatigue. Then reveille, and again, liquid mud over the
ankles. As the main road was forbidden to our ambulances there was an
excited discussion as a result of which we separated: the vehicles to
go in search of a by-way, and we, the pedestrians, to skirt the roads on
which long lines of motor-lorries, coming and going, passed each other
in haste like the carriages of an immense train.

We had known since midnight where we were to take up our quarters; the
suburb of G----was only an hour's march further on. In the fields, right
and left, were bivouacs of colonial troops with muddy helmets; they had
come back from the firing line, and seemed strangely quiet. In front
of us lay the town, half hidden, full of crackling sounds and echoes.
Beyond, the hills of the Meuse, on which we could distinguish the houses
of the villages, and the continuous rain of machine-gun bullets. We
skirted a meadow strewn with forsaken furniture, beds, chests, a whole
fortune which looked like the litter of a hospital. At last we arrived
at the first houses, and we were shown the place where we were expected.

There were two brick buildings of several storeys, connected by a glazed
corridor; the rest of the enclosure was occupied by wooden sheds. Behind
lay orchards and gardens, the first houses of the suburb. In front, the
wall of a park, a meadow, a railway track, and La Route, the wonderful
and terrible road that enters the town at this very point.

Groups of lightly wounded men were hobbling towards the hospital;
the incessant rush of motors kept up the feverish circulation of a
demolished ant-hill.

As we approached the buildings, a doctor came out to meet us.

"Come, come. There's work enough for a month."

It was true. The effluvium and the moans of several hundreds of wounded
men greeted us. Ambulance No----, which we had come to relieve, had
been hard at it since the night before, without having made much visible
progress. Doctors and orderlies, their faces haggard from a night of
frantic toil, came and went, choosing among the heaps of wounded, and
tended two while twenty more