bundles of blue
rags and bloody blankets turned into human beings; an overworked,
nervous medecin chef shouted contradictory orders at the brancardiers,
and passed into real crises of hysterical rage.

"Avancez!" he would scream at the bewildered chauffeurs of the
ambulances; and an instant later, "Reculez! Reculez!"

The wounded in the stretchers, strewn along the edges of the driveway,
raised patient, tired eyes at his snarling.

Another doctor, a little bearded man wearing a white apron and the red
velvet kepi of an army physician, questioned each batch of new arrivals.
Deep lines of fatigue had traced themselves under his kindly eyes; his
thin face had a dreadful color. Some of the wounded had turned their
eyes from the sun; others, too weak to move, lay stonily blinking.
Almost expressionless, silent, they resigned themselves to the
attendants as if these men were the deaf ministers of some inexorable
power.

The surgeon went from stretcher to stretcher looking at the diagnosis
cards attached at the poste de secours, stopping occasionally to ask the
fatal question, "As-tu crache du sang?" (Have you spit blood?) A thin
oldish man with a face full of hollows like that of an old horse,
answered "Oui," faintly. Close by, an artilleryman, whose cannon had
burst, looked with calm brown eyes out of a cooked and bluish face.
Another, with a soldier's tunic thrown capewise over his naked torso,
trembled in his thin blanket, and from the edges of a cotton and
lint-pad dressing hastily stuffed upon a shoulder wound, an occasional
drop of blood slid down his lean chest.

A little to one side, the cooks of the hospital, in their greasy aprons,
watched the performance with a certain calm interest. In a few minutes
the wounded were sorted and sent to the various wards. I was ordered to
take three men who had been successfully operated on to the barracks for
convalescents several miles away.

A highway and an unused railroad, both under heavy fire from German guns
on the Hauts de Meuse, passed behind the chateau and along the foot of
the bluffs. There were a hundred shell holes in the marshes between the
road and the river, black-lipped craters in the sedgy green; there were
ugly punches in the brown earth of the bluffs, and deep scoops in the
surface of the road. The telephone wires, cut by shell fragments, fell
in stiff, draping lines to the ground. Every once in a while a shell
would fall into the river, causing a silve