WITH THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE CORPS AT PARIS.


We were sitting under the trees in the Champs Élysées, in sight of the
ruined Tuileries, when my friend gave me the following reminiscences.
In repeating what I can recall of them, as nearly as I can in his own
language, I shall use names with almost as great freedom as he did--a
fact for which I think I owe no apology.

"Restore that wreck of the Tuileries," said my friend--but I shall
let him tell his story without quotation-marks, and without the
interruption of my urging and questionings, that finally got him
almost as much interested in his subject as I was myself--Restore that
wreck of the Tuileries, and these gay equipages and these loiterers
in the Avenue would repeat for you, very nearly, the scene of my first
service with the American ambulance. That was before I was a regular
member of the corps--in fact, before the corps which operated at the
siege of Paris had been properly formed. Dr. Sims, Dr. Tom Pratt,
Frank Hayden and others, with three ambulance-wagons, were going to
the front: we heard a great deal of _"à Berlin!"_ in the streets in
those days. I came down this way to the Palais d'Industrie to see
them off, and when I did see the American ladies raising the colors
to march through the crowd, I couldn't help taking part in the
procession. So I put on the _brassard_ of Geneva--a red cross on a
white band strapped on the arm, being the ambulance badge established
in 1864 by the International Convention of Geneva--and seized one
of the sticks with a sack on the end of it, and began asking
contributions for the wounded as the cortege moved on.