field of action is more
restricted and the aid is better organized.

[Sidenote: Transportation is painful and dangerous.]

[Sidenote: Relief at the first dressing station.]

[Sidenote: The nurses devoted and the sufferers resigned.]

If transportation, however, is less retarded than three years ago, it is
still painful and rather dangerous. Even when a special passage has been
dug before the attack for the evacuation of the wounded, all jolts are
not avoided in this dark and narrow way; but in going through the
ordinary passage-ways, dangerous and unseen obstacles are often
encountered--crumbling earth, perhaps, or convoys going in the opposite
direction. If they heeded the wounded soldier, the stretcher-bearers
would go on open ground. This he frequently does, if he is at all able
to get on without aid; once hit he thinks himself invulnerable--a
singular illusion which has brought about many catastrophes. At the
first dressing-station and at the front hospital, relief begins. In
ordinary times, this will be quite complete, and the wounded will not be
carried to the rear until they are really able to stand the journey. But
while the battle is on, they must go in the greatest haste: the worst
cases are thoroughly cared for; the badly hurt who can be moved receive
the attention which enables them to depart speedily; the slight cases
have to be content with summary consideration. Here one sees the
devotion of the nurses and the resignation of the sufferers, and better
than resignation: the noble effort not to moan, the murmured prayer, the
forgetfulness of self, eagerness to ask news of the fight. Among the
falsities of a book a thousand times too vaunted (falsities due not so
much to the lie direct as to the constant dwelling on odious details,
and the suppression of admirable facts), nothing is farther from the
truth than the picture of a hospital at the front where one hears and
sees only blaspheming and rebellious men. With most of the wounded who
have spoken to me about it in our hospital, and who certainly had the
right to bear witness, we proclaim loudly that if the French army had
been such as the work in question paints it in this passage and in many
others, the War would have ended long ago, and history would never have
known the names of the Marne, nor the Yser, nor Verdun, nor the
Chemin-des-Dames.

[Sidenote: A true picture of our Ambulance at the front.]

A true picture of an Ambulance at the front, ov