great responsibility.

Field ambulances are virtually all alike and as a rule hold four
stretchers in two tiers. In front are seats for the driver and his
orderly, and behind is a boxlike body eight feet long with wooden roof
and floor and canvas sides. From the back of the ambulance a wounded
man on his stretcher is slid into place as a bread pan is slid into an
oven, the feet of the stretcher running on wooden rails. In starting
out to collect the wounded an ambulance carries its full quota of
stretchers. When a man is picked up from the field of battle one of
these is taken out and he is carefully lifted on it; if he is already
lying on a stretcher he is not changed but, in order to save
unnecessary suffering, put into the ambulance with the one on which he
is already resting,--an empty one being left behind in exchange. In
order that this process may always be feasible it is necessary that
all stretchers should be interchangeable; the Minister of War has,
therefore, decreed that a standard stretcher called "Branquard
reglementaire," and no other, must be used throughout the French
armies.

As the number of casualties has been overwhelmingly and unexpectedly
large, the French have not up to date been able to give proper care to
their wounded. It is not uncommon for wounded men _en route_ from the
front to be on trains for three and four days, virtually uncared for,
and usually without anything to eat. Such trains finally arrive in
Paris freighted with death and madness, with gangrene and lockjaw. I
today saw two men who had been wounded a month ago and were still in
the clothes in which they had fought.

The American Corps keeps ambulances at the Aubervilliers station day
and night in relays, so that at any moment not less than two cars are
there to receive wounded. Today I was assigned as orderly to an
ambulance on the afternoon shift which begins at one o'clock and ends
at nine. The receiving station for wounded is a huge express shed
about three hundred feet long and sixty feet wide. A railway siding
enters through a big door and within runs longitudinally along one
wall. A large storage platform occupies the rest of the interior, on
which are arranged four parallel benches running nearly the whole
length of the shed. Each bench is about seven feet wide and has a
slight slope for "drainage." When we arrived all the benches were
crowded with wounded, who were packed side by side in four long
ghastly rows. They