shed was still habitable. The rest was debris.

The church in the foreground was recognizable as such by the
shape and size of its ragged walls, and by a half-smashed image
of the Virgin and Child which slanted out at a perilous angle
above its façade.

Yet, miserable as the ruined hamlet seemed to the casual eye, it
was at present a vacation-resort--and a decidedly welcome one--to
no less than three thousand tired men. The wrecked church was an
impromptu hospital beneath whose shattered roof dozens of these
men lay helpless on makeshift cots.

For the mixed American and French regiment known as the "Here-We-
Comes" was billeted at Meran-en-Laye during a respite from the
rigors and perils of the front-line trenches.

The rest and the freedom from risks, supposed to be a part of the
"billeting" system, were not wholly the portion of the "Here-We
Comes." Meran--en--Laye was just then a somewhat important little
speck on the warmap.

The Germans had been up to their favorite field sport of trying
to split in half two of the Allied armies, and to roll up each,
independently. The effort had been a failure; yet it had come so
near to success that many railway communications were cut off or
deflected. And Meran-en-Laye had for the moment gained new
importance, by virtue of a spur railway-line which ran through
its outskirts and which made junction with a new set of tracks
the American engineers were completing. Along this transverse of