I

IN THE American "special" which carried soldiers and officers of the A. E. F. between two main points on the American line of communication, one could sleep comfortably stretched out at full length beneath warm blankets. An hour or two after dawn there appeared the colored sergeant formerly belonging to the New York Central Railroad, a gentleman who, in time of war as in time of peace, inevitably answered to the name of George.

We shaved and washed and prepared to arrive at an important American military centre just as if we were about to pull into the Grand Central Station. George served hot coffee and roast beef sandwiches. A tall and genial military policeman entered and examined our papers during the banquet. Tickets and cash are not needed on the American "special"-but correct papers are. One travels free if at all.

A captain drew my attention to an orderly vista of warehouses and repair shops stretching away from the railroad tracks, which made clear for the hundredth time that if the United States

In

Army has shortcomings, smallness of conception is not among them. My traveling companion had done some work here, but he was glad to be returning to the front where he was to direct a moving repair shop for guns. He was one of those officers who, in spite of inexperience in warfare, have something of the air of veterans. my travels with soldiers it often has seemed to me that such men are marked. The type is distinct. This particular captain-man had run away from home at fifteen; he had been a cowpuncher, a salesman in Mexico, and later a member of Pershing's army there. He invited me to go with him to the front. It was out of the question; but I knew that one who should follow him would have experiences worth recordingif he happened to survive them.

The city where I left the train was in the advanced zone. It was out of reach and sound of guns (a good bit farther from the front than from Paris), yet it was permeated with the sense of that vague, indefinite region known as "the front." The place was full of staff cars. When

I asked a private the way to headquarters, he said it was on the road turning off to the left from "the general's house." Yes, this was "the general's" home town and by "the general" only one person was meant.

Next day we motored through a fine but remorseless rain over sticky red roads to another important Americanized town, from which I made an excursion to two baths which revealed impressively what preparation the army had made for its sick and wounded. In both places, which are near together, there are what are known as base hospitals-but the simple term "base hospital" only begins to suggest what is there. In truth, they are dream towns for convalescents.

The Red Cross has taken over the bathing plants, has revived the silent engine rooms, and serves the patients of thirteen adjacent buildings. Recently when a Red Cross hospital train arrived full of wounded, who had stopped only once on their journey from the front for the first dressing, the men were taken to these baths, and by eight o'clock in the morning 350 had been bathed, blanketed, and carried on stretchers to hospital beds. In other words, the baths were used as a receiving station. And since cleanliness brings a sick man even closer to godliness than it does a healthy man, it is easy to understand the great value of the institution.

Across the gardens from the baths the Red Cross has taken over a theatre. It is not a hut theatre; it has gold trimmings! The Red Cross representative had visions of discovering dramatic talents in the convalescing patients and the hospital staffs. Between hiring Broadway singers to sing the same old Broadway songs and inspiring the boys themselves to put on a play, the choice is all in favor of the latter.

There also are a library and a writing room in another part of the garden and farm, where earlier in the year the Red Cross steam plow drew fifteen hundred farmer admirers from the countryside. A steam plow never had been seen there before. One can perceive the reason when it is explained that the Red Cross garden of about ten acres was divided among not less than seventeen different owners. different owners. The second bathing establishment has not only a theatre but also golf links, tennis courts, and a baseball field.

The next day a truck started for the last town on our side of the lines, and I joined the driver on the front seat. We halted for lunch in a tiny mud hole surrounded with low brick buildings and high heaps of barnyard wealth. I said to my companion that I didn't believe any other Americans had penetrated into this place, which looked like a meeting place for cut-throats of a romantic novel. Hardly had the words been

uttered when a band of Americans poured in. They were telephone linemen-an adventurous crowd who long since had learned to take care of themselves in the remotest villages of France. They spoke an ingenious, a useful language, which served their purpose.

The country from this point was agreeable and good to be in, despite the everlasting rain. Sometimes it looked like southern Scotland and sometimes as barren as the north. Before the end of the drive, we traversed the country that had been fought over, and I saw my first German "pill box." Old trenches and rusty wire entanglements appeared. Finally we reached a walled town, the last one outside of the firing zone. The next day I entered the region where steel helmets are constantly worn and gas masks are always ready.

First of all there was a sign. The letters were white on a blue background. I had been looking at the road, fascinated; and when the blue sign -"Attention! The enemy sees you!"-nailed to a tree on the right suddenly came into view, my nerves tightened. As an ambulance volunteer with the French army I had often been nearer the lines than this. But here there was a difference. It was my first view of Americans actually in the fighting zone, within gun range. A series of hills, looking like the upturned hulls of yachts, bounded our vision. At one end they

sloped sharply upward from a comparatively flat base, and at the other they sloped with a long graceful curve. On a pale blue hill far at the left, beyond the German lines, were German guns. At curves in roads, dust-stained screens of camouflage waved between us and the eyes of the enemy. An officer said to the driver, "From here on, don't use your horn."

Motley groups of soldiers in muddy boots, with gas masks hanging from their necks, were engaged in the innumerable tasks of war. A camion trundled by, disregarding half-filled shell holes. The formalities of the soldier on parade had vanished. Here were no dressed-up men, but fighters in their working clothes. The private, not the tailors' idol, looked best in this setting. Over there in the trees beyond the swamp an observation balloon lay hidden and a car had turned into the crude new road that apparently led nowhere. A sentinel stepped from his shelter and stopped our car. A word from the officer on my right, and we passed on.

Going down a slope into a town shelled and broken, the car halted. We got out and turned to the right. A hundred yards away in a field was the burial ground of the first American soldiers who had died in action. Soldiers were digging other graves. ging other graves. Far, terribly far, it seemed from home.

We traversed a village literally swarming with

American soldiers. Between trucks and narrowgauge railway cars, guns, ammunition, soldiers and horses, messengers on motor cycles dodged and sped.

Out on the road again, beyond the dishevelled, crowded town, shell holes appeared more and more often. In the lee of the slope an American battery was hidden. The officer at my right knew it was there. Yet after his pointing it out I could not see it. Excellent camouflage. Look ing ahead I became convinced that the road led to some intolerable crater and that we had but to drive straight on finally to reach the edge and to drop off into a boiling mass of earth and rocks and bodies. The road to hell!

They gave us a hot drink at an American Red Cross outpost. To enter it, we had to skirt a shell hole big enough to hide a hand-organ. We went on with the Red Cross outpost director. "We're coming to

Hell's Bent," said the driver of the car. I smiled at the name. At the next curve I found out. Three ambulances

lay upturned, mangled, tossed ten or fifteen yards off the road. There was a "Dead Man's Curve," too; it was marked the same way.

Think of being brought in wounded, of having your wounds dressed, of being on your way back to the hospital, of feeling that you were going to be taken care of, to rest in a clean hospital bed and to rest long and comfortably, to sleep peacefully in a quiet place, to be made whole again and

then think of a shell

heap on the side of the road. That's a vicious turn of fate. But it has happened many times at Dead Man's Curve.

In the next rock-heap, or "town," was the entrance to the trenches. There was plenty of life, but most of it underground. When we began to skate in the mud, which still was as nothing when compared to the mud in the trenches, I realized why, in war diaries of this region, there is the ever recurring phrase, "It rained again to-day." I had not really grasped before the meaning of the phrase. Now I understood at once how fervently men can pray for sunlight. Already I began to hate the mud. It seemed an

unnecessary villainy on the part of nature. We stepped from a pool of ooze to duck-boards leading to the advanced dressing station, then down narrow steps where a sergeant and an oil lamp were the only occupants for the moment.

An hour later the motor turned back toward Dead Man's Curve. Frankly, breathing was easier when those curves and the junked ambulances were past. Yet Dead Man's Curve is a long walk from the front lines. Together with five shell-shock cases I was put up that night in the back room of the Red Cross outpost. The place must have been a bakery once. The first time I had passed through this town of A-, it struck me as literally a mud-hole on the edge of oblivion. Returning from the front zone, it seemed a lovely place a civilized village of joy after the burrowings inhabited by the men on the other side of Hell's Bent. To be sure, one could not sanely go 'round the corner in A- without his gas mask. If one stuck his head out of a door without it, somebody was sure to yell "mask!" As for a light at nightwell, that was a sure way to get shot, and not by a German gun, either. Only a fool or a traitor would

from that razor hill miles back of the Boche lines pursuing you and, disregarding the open fields on either side of the empty road where it might land harmlessly, making you its target. You and the You and the fellow lying in the stretcher above you and the two on the other side of the ambulance are thrown out of life together and become part of the junk

show a light; and neither of the types was considered useful in this vicinity. The simplest way to get rid of him was the surest. It had not happened yet, but there was an order to that effect, or the salutary rumor of one.

On the way to mess I noted at the corner of the two streets a hand Klaxon, the gas signal. Though the road to mess was muddy, it was worth taking. In that low stone-walled room the officers sat round a big table. When the colonel entered they rose to a man and his "Be seated, gentlemen," was a bit of civilization among the ruins. The officers for the most part were young, an exceedingly attractive, straight-looking lot of men. Their boots were muddy, perforce, but their faces were clean and shaved, their hair well brushed. There is an expression in their eyes different from that in the European eye. One or two stalwart young men in the early twenties had faces as innocent as babies-quiet, conscientious, inexperienced faces. They appeared to have what, for lack of a better term, might be called a dangerous innocence-that is, dangerous for their enemies, the Boches. We invited two of the shell-shocked boys to smoke with us in the rear room. It was five days since they had been brought in, and they were almost ready to return to the front. One was nineteen, a little fellow with big blue eyes; the other was twenty. It had been their first real fight and they were full of it. I had been told that the boy of nineteen had been the bravest of the gang; yet when he told me his story he kept repeating, "Gee, I was scared!"

high-school boy repeated. He went again. He was knocked over again. Each time it was harder to get through and over the dirt piles in the trench. Finally he couldn't get through. He tried to, but he couldn't. If he had succeeded he would have been blown to bits, for while he was trying a shell landed in front of him and exploded.

Seven times he escaped death by inches. "I was getting more scared every minute, but I couldn't get through. Pretty soon there was nothing to get through to. nothing to get through to. You see, it was my first real fight, and gee! there was an awful lot of shells fallin' and I kind of began to feel as if I didn't have any strength. Well, some other fellows carried me back and they brought me in here. Now I feel fine."

The story of the boy of twenty told how he had carried a message from the front lines to an artillery post. He had stumbled through hell, been knocked down, had fallen down and thrown himself down a dozen times, obstinately clinging to

He had gone seven times through a German barrage. He was carrying ammunition, and the trench through which he went back and forth was beaten into heaps of dirt and rocks by the enemy shells. On the first trip, a shell hit just ahead of him, and he was knocked over by the force of it. "Gee, I was scared!" the little

his mission. "I

couldn't go another step, but I got hold of a fellow who could take the word on for me. He got it there all right. It wasn't far then. But it was too far for me. I was all in, and I was scared. But the message got there. I feel fine now. This Red Cross outpost has sure been one godsend to us fellows. They certainly have treated us well. Do you remember, Captain Underwood? You slept between us that first night."

Captain Underwood remembered perfectly. There was no danger of his forgetting, for he nearly lost the canteen that night. Shells hit all around it within a few feet. The Red Cross man walked through the shelling to the near-by dressing station to see if he could help the overworked doctor. The doctor passed the five mild shellshock cases to him, and they were brought to the Red Cross outpost where he fathered them.