coming down--with not a flicker of light on any of them. The Red
Cross on our ambulance gave us the right of way over everything but
ammunition trucks, so we sped forward rapidly. It was revitalment
time. Hundreds of motor trucks and horsecarts laden with munitions,
food, men and the thousand and one supplies needed to keep an army
going, were making their nightly trip to the trenches. When we
reached a point near the top of the long hill, which we had been
climbing, we got out of the ambulance and found that we were at
a first aid dugout just back of the hill from whose top one could
see the battle. The first aid post was a cave tunnelled a few yards
into the hillside covered with railroad iron and sandbags. In the
dugout was a little operating room where the wounded were bandaged
before starting them down the hill in the ambulance to the hospital,
and three doctors and half a dozen stretcher bearers were standing
inside out of the misty rain.

As we had been climbing the hill in the ambulance, the roar of the
big guns grew louder and louder. We believed it was French cannon.
But when we got out of the car we heard an angry whistle and a
roar which told us that German shells were coming in near us. As
we stood before the dugout shivering in the mist we saw beyond us,
over the hill, the glare of the French trench rockets lighting up
the clouds above us weirdly, and spreading a sickly glow over the
white muddy road before us. On the road skirting the very door of
the dugout passed a line of motor trucks and carts--the revitalment
train. The mist walled us in. Every few seconds out of the mist
came a huge grey truck or a lumbering two-wheeled cart; and then,
creaking heavily past the dugout door, plunged into the mist again.
Never did the procession stop. At regular intervals the German
shells crashed into the woods farther up the hill beyond us. But