ng to break clear through the lines?"

The soldier shrugged his shoulders. "They hope to," he replied.

Just beyond us, in one of the thousand stretchers on the floor, a small
bearded man had died. With his left leg and groin swathed in bandages,
he lay flat on his back, his mouth open, muddy, dirty, and dead. From
time to time the living on each side stole curious, timid glances at
him. Then, suddenly, some one noticed the body, and two
stretcher-bearers carried it away, and two more brought a living man
there in its place.

The turmoil continued to increase. At least a thousand motor-ambulances,
mobilized from all over the region of Paris, were now on hand to carry
away the human wreckage of the great offensive. Ignorant of the ghastly
army at its doors, Paris slept. The rain continued to fall heavily.

"Eh la, comrade."

A soldier in the late thirties, with a pale, refined face, hailed me
from his stretcher.

"You speak French?"

I nodded.

"I am going to ask you to do me a favor--write to my wife who is here in
Paris, and tell her that I am safe and shall let her know at once what
hospital I am sent to. I shall be very grateful."

He let his shoulders sink to the stretcher again and I saw him now and
then looking for me in the crowd. Catching my eye, he smiled.

A train full of Algerian troops came puffing into the station, the
uproar hardly rising above the general hubbub. The passengers who were
able to walk got out first, some limping, some walking firmly with a
splendid Eastern dignity. These men were Arabs and Moors from Algeria
and Tunisia, who had enlisted in the colonial armies. There was a great
diversity of size and racial type among them, some being splendid, big
men of the type one imagines Othello to have been, some chunkier and
more bullet-headed, and others tall and lean with interesting aquiline
features. I fancy that the shorter, rounder-skulled ones were those with
a dash of black blood. The uniform, of khaki-colored woolen, consisted
of a simple, short-waisted jacket, big baggy trousers, puttees, and a
red fez or a steel helmet with the lunar crescent and "R.F." for its
device. We heard rumors about their having attacked a village. Advancing
in the same curious tempo as the French, they passed to the braziers and
the wooden benches. Last of all from the train, holding his bandaged arm
against his chest, a native corporal with the features of a desert
tribesman advanced with superb, unc