“Are the Boches retreating?”

“When did it begin?”

“Just where is the attack located?”

“Are things going well for us?”

The soldier, a big young fellow with a tanned face, somewhat pale from the shock of a ripped-up forearm, answered the questions good-naturedly, though the struggle had been on so great a scale that he could only tell about his own hundred feet of trench.  Indeed the substance of his information was that there had been a terrible bombardment of the German lines, and then an attack by the French which was still in progress.

“Are we going to break clear through the lines?”

The soldier shrugged his shoulders.  “They hope to,” he replied.

Just beyond us, in one of the thousand stretchers on the floor, a small bearded man had died.  With his left leg and groin swathed in bandages, he lay flat on his back, his mouth open, muddy, dirty, and dead.  From time to time the living on each side stole curious, timid glances at him.  Then, suddenly, some one noticed the body, and two stretcher-bearers carried it away, and two more brought a living man there in its place.

The turmoil continued to increase.  At least a thousand motor-ambulances, mobilized from all over the region of Paris, were now on hand to carry away the human wreckage of the great offensive.  Ignorant of the ghastly army at its doors, Paris slept.  The rain continued to fall heavily.

“Eh la, comrade.”

A soldier in the late thirties, with a pale, refined face, hailed me from his stretcher.

“You speak French?”

I nodded.

“I am going to ask you to do me a favor—­write to my wife who is here in Paris, and tell her that I am safe and shall let her know at once what hospital I am sent to.  I shall be very grateful.”

He let his shoulders sink to the stretcher again and I saw him now and then looking for me in the crowd.  Catching my eye, he smiled.

A train full of Algerian troops came puffing into the station, the uproar hardly rising above the general hubbub.  The passengers who were able to walk got out first, some limping, some walking firmly with a splendid Eastern dignity.  These men were Arabs and Moors from Algeria and Tunisia, who had enlisted in the colonial armies.  There was a great diversity of size and racial type among them, some being splendid, big men of the type one imagines Othello to have been, some chunkier and more bullet-headed, and others tall and lean with interesting aquiline features.  I fancy that the shorter, rounder-skulled ones were those with a dash of black blood.  The uniform, of khaki-colored woolen, consisted of a simple, short-waisted jacket, big baggy trousers, puttees, and a red fez or a steel helmet with the lunar crescent and “R.F.” for its device.  We heard rumors about their having attacked a village.  Advancing in the same curious tempo as the French, they passed to the braziers and