roofs over with straw and broken tree limbs. We
judged they would be very glad indeed to crawl into those same shelters
when night came, for they had been serving the guns all day and plainly
were about as weary as men could be. To burn powder hour after hour and
day after day and week after week at a foe who never sees you and whom
you never see; to go at this dreary, heavy trade of war with the sober,
uninspired earnestness of convicts building a prison wall about
themselves--the ghastly unreality of the proposition left me mentally
numbed.

Howsoever, we arrived not long after that at a field hospital--namely,
Field Hospital Number 36, and here was realism enough to satisfy the
lexicographer who first coined the word. This field hospital was
established in eight abandoned houses of the abandoned small French
village of Colligis, and all eight houses were crowded with wounded men
lying as closely as they could lie upon mattresses placed side by side
on the floors, with just room to step between the mattresses. Be it
remembered also that these were all men too seriously wounded to be
moved even to a point as close as Laon; those more lightly injured than
these were already carried back to the main hospitals.

We went into one room containing only men suffering from chest wounds,
who coughed and wheezed and constantly fought off the swarming flies
that assailed them, and into another room given over entirely to
brutally abbreviated human fragments--fractional parts of men who had
lost their arms or legs. On the far mattress against the wall lay a
little pale German with his legs gone below the knees, who smiled upward
at the ceiling and was quite chipper.

"A wonderful man, that little chap," said one of the surgeons to me.
"When they first brought him here two weeks ago I said to him: 'It's
hard on you that you should lose both your feet,' and he looked up at me
and grinned and said: 'Herr Doctor, it might have been worse. It might
have been my hands--and me a tailor by trade!'"

This surgeon told us he had an American wife, and he asked me to bear a
message for him to his wife's people in the States. So if these lines
should come to the notice of Mrs. Rosamond Harris, who lives at
Hinesburg, Vermont, she may know that her son-in-law, Doctor Schilling,
was at last accounts very busy and very well, although coated with white
dust--face, head and eyebrows--so that he reminded me of a clown in a
pantomime, and