“Up, birds!”

The lieutenant of the Paris Section, a mining engineer with a picturesque vocabulary of Nevadan profanity, was standing in his pajama trousers at the head of the room, holding a lantern in his hand.  “Up, birds!” he called again.  “Call’s come in for Lah Chapelle.”  There were uneasy movements under the blankets, inmates of adjoining beds began to talk to each other, and some lit their bedside candles.  The chief went down both sides of the dormitory, flashing his lantern before each bed, ragging the sleepy.  “Get up, So-and-So.  Well, I must say, Pete, you have a hell of a nerve.”  There were glimpses of candle flames, bare bodies shivering in the damp cold, and men sitting on beds, winding on their puttees.  “Gee! listen to it rain,” said somebody.  “What time is it?” “Twenty minutes past two.”  Soon the humming and drumming of the motors in the yard sounded through the roaring of the downpour.

Down in the yard I found Oiler, my orderly, and our little Ford ambulance, number fifty-three.  One electric light, of that sickly yellow color universal in France, was burning over the principal entrance to the hospital, just giving us light enough to see our way out of the gates.  Down the narrow, dark Boulevard Inkerman we turned, and then out on to a great street which led into the “outer” boulevard of De Batignolles and Clichy.  To that darkness with which the city, in fear of raiding aircraft, has hidden itself, was added the continuous, pouring rain.  In the light of our lamps, the wet, golden trees of the black, silent boulevards shone strangely, and the illuminated advertising kiosks which we passed, one after the other at the corners of great streets, stood lonely and drenched, in the swift, white touch of our radiance.  Black and shiny, the asphalt roadway appeared to go on in a straight line forever and forever.

Neither in residential, suburban Neuilly nor in deserted Montmartre was there a light to be seen, but when we drew into the working quarter of La Chapelle, lights appeared in the windows, as if some toiler of the night was expected home or starting for his labor, and vague forms, battling with the rain or in refuge under the awning of a cafe, were now and then visible.  From the end of the great, mean rue de La Chapelle the sounds of the unrest of the railroad yards began to be heard, for this street leads to the freight-houses near the fortifications.  Our objective was a great freight station which the Government, some months before, had turned into a receiving-post for the wounded; it lay on the edge of the yard, some distance in from the street, behind a huddle of smaller sheds and outbuildings.  To our surprise the rue de La Chapelle was strewn with ambulances rushing from the station, and along two sides of the great yard, where the merchandise trucks had formerly turned in, six or seven hundred more ambulances were waiting.  We turned out of the dark, rain-swept city into this hurly-burly of shouts, snorting of engines, clashing of gears, and whining of brakes, illuminated with a thousand intermeshing beams of headlights across whose brilliance the rain fell in sloping, liquid rods.  “Quick, a small car this way!” cried some one in an authoritative tone, and number fifty-three ran up an inclined plane into the enormous shed which had been reserved for the loading of the wounded into the ambulances.