n into that part
of the great shed where the wounded were being unloaded from the trains.
In width, this part measured four hundred feet, but in length it ran to
eight hundred. In two rows of six each, separated by an aisle about
eight feet wide, were twelve little houses, about forty feet square,
built of stucco, each one painted a different color. The woodwork of the
exterior was displayed through the plaster in the Elizabethan fashion,
and the little sheds were clean, solidly built, and solidly roofed. In
one of these constructions was the bureau of the staff which assigned
the wounded to the hospitals, in another was a fully equipped
operating-room, and in the others, rows of stretcher-horses, twenty-five
to a side, on which the wounded were laid until a hospital number had
been assigned them. A slip, with these hospital numbers on it, the names
of the patients, and the color of the little house in which they were to
be found, was then given to the chauffeur of an ambulance, who, with
this slip in hand and followed by a number of stretcher-bearers,
immediately gathered his patients. A specimen slip might run thus--"To
Hospital 32, avenue de Iena, Paul Chaubard, red barraque, Jules Adamy,
green barraque, and Alphonse Fort, ochre barraque."

To give a French touch to the scene, this great space, rapidly filling
with human beings in an appalling state of misery, as the aftermath of
the offensive broke on us, was decorated with evergreen trees and shrubs
so that the effect was that of an indoor fair or exhibition; you felt as
if you might get samples of something at each barraque, as the French
termed the little houses. To the side of these there was a platform, and
a sunken track running along the wall, and behind, a great open space
set with benches for those of the wounded able to walk. Some fifty
great, cylindrical braziers, which added a strange bit of rosy, fiery
color to the scene, warmed this space. When the wounded had begun to
arrive at about midnight, a regiment of Zouaves was at hand to help the
regular stretcher-bearers; these Zouaves were all young, "husky" men
dressed in the baggy red trousers and short blue jacket of their classic
uniform, and their strength was in as much of a contrast to the weakness
of those whom they handled as their gay uniform was in contrast to the
miry, horizon blue of the combatants. There was something grotesque in
seeing two of these powerful fellows carrying to the wagons a di