As we grouped in the narrow street before his shop, with a hiving swarm
of curious villagers buzzing about us, an improvised ambulance, with a
red cross painted on its side over the letters of a baker's sign, went
up the steep hill at the head of the cobbled street. At that the women
in the doorways of the small cottages twisted their gnarled red hands in
their aprons, and whispered fearsomely among themselves, so that the
sibilant sound of their voices ran up and down the line of houses in a
long, quavering hiss.

The wagon, it seemed, was bringing in a wounded French soldier who had
been found in the woods beyond the river. He was one of the last to be
found alive, which was another way of saying that for two days and two
nights he had been lying helpless in the thicket, his stomach empty and
his wounds raw. On each of those two nights it had rained, and rained
hard.

Just as we started on our way the big guns began booming somewhere ahead
of us toward the southwest; so we turned in that direction.

We had heard the guns distinctly in the early forenoon, and again, less
distinctly, about noontime. Thereafter, for a while, there had been a
lull in the firing; but now it was constant--a steady, sustained boom-
boom-boom, so far away that it fell on the eardrums as a gentle
concussion; as a throb of air, rather than as a real sound. For three
days now we had been following that distant voice of the cannon, trying
to catch up with it as it advanced, always southward, toward the French
frontier. Therefore we flogged the belly of our tired horse with the
lash of a long whip, and hurried along. There were five of us, all
Americans. The two who rode on bicycles pedaled ahead as outriders, and
the remaining three followed on behind with the horse and the dogcart.