PARIS September 23, 1915.

I am off to-morrow at 7.30 a.m., to Boulogne, then Calais and reach
Dunkirk at 9.30 p.m.

I have had two very strenuous days and will be glad to rest in the train
to-morrow. It took such a time to get my papers in order. The
thermometer for the last two days has been about 100.

MOBILE NO. 1, France, 1915.

I am really not in France but Belgium. I cannot tell you just where, but
it is within ten miles of the firing line, and not far from the place
where so many of our boys from home have been sent. I thought when I
came here that it would be entirely English, as the lady who gave the
hospital is an American married to an Englishman. The English are not
far away but they are taken to their own hospitals.

We belong to a little wedge of the French that is in between the
English and Belgians. It is a regular field hospital and is composed of
a great many portable huts or sheds; some are fitted up as wards,
another the operating room, another the pharmacy, another supply room,
laundry, nurses' quarters, doctors' quarters, etc. It is a little colony
set down in the fields and the streets are wooden sidewalks.

The first night I arrived I did not sleep, for the guns roared all night
long, and we could see the flashes from the shells quite plainly; the
whole sky was aglow. The French and English guns sounded like a
continuous roar of thunder; but when the shells from the German guns
landed on this side we could feel a distinct shock, and everything in
our little shanty rattled.

Yesterday I saw my first battle in the air between German and French
aeroplanes. We could scarcely see the machines, they were so high up in
the air, but we could see the flashes from their guns quite distinctly
and hear the explosion of the shells. To-day a whole fleet of aeroplanes
passed over our heads; it was a wonderful sight.

There are about one hundred and fifty beds in all here.

I have been inspected by doctors, captains, generals, and all kinds of
people till I am weary. I hope they are satisfied at last, but I cannot
go off the hospital grounds until I have two different kinds of passes
given to me,--one is a permission to go on the roads about here and the
other is good as far as Dunkirk.

We have a man in our ward who had a piece of shrapnel the size of an egg
in his abdomen; they had to take out about half a yard of intestines,
w