Our bureau in the cellar of Wisteria Villa was connected directly with the trenches.  When a man had been wounded, he was carried to the poste de secours in the rear lines, and it was our duty to go to this trench post and carry the patient to the hospital at the nearest rail-head.  The bureau of the Section was in charge of two Frenchmen who shared the labor of attending to the telephone and keeping the books.

A hundred yards beyond Wisteria Villa, at a certain corner, the principal road to the trenches divided into three branches, and in order to interfere as much as possible with communications, the Germans daily shelled this strategic point.  A comrade and I had the curiosity to keep an exact record of a week’s shelling.  It must be remembered that the corner was screened from the Germans, who fired casually in the hope of hitting something and annoying the French.  The cannons shelling the corner were usually “seventy-sevens,” the German quick-firing pieces that correspond to the French “seventy-fives.”

Monday, ten shells at 6.30, two at 7.10, five at 11.28, twenty at intervals between 2.15 and 2.45, a swift rafale of some sixteen at 4.12, another rafale of twenty at 8, and occasional shells between 9 and midnight.

Tuesday, two big shells at mid-day.

Wednesday, rafales at 9.14, 11, 2.18, 4.30, and 6.20.

Thursday—­no shells.

Friday, twelve at intervals between 10.16 and 12.20.  Solitary big shell at 1.05.  Another big shell at 3.  Some fifteen stray shells between 5 and midnight.

Saturday—­no shells.

Sunday—­About five shells an hour between 4 in the afternoon and midnight.

I give the number of shells falling at this corner as a concrete instance of what was happening at a dozen other points along the road.  The fire of the German batteries was as capricious as the play of a search-light; one week, the corner and three or four other points would catch it, the next week the corner and another set of localities.  And there were periods, sometimes ten days to two weeks long, when hardly a shell was fired at any road.  Then, after a certain sense of security had begun to take form, a rafale would come screaming over, blow a horse and wagon to pieces, and leave one or two blue figures huddled in the mud.  But the French replied to each shell and every rafale, in addition to firing at random all the day and a good deal of the night.  There was hardly a night that Wisteria Villa did not rock to the sound of French guns fired at 2 and 3 in the morning.  But the average day at Pont-a-Mousson was a day of random silences.  The war had all the capricious-ness of the sea—­of uncertain weather.  There were hours of calm in the day, during which the desolate silence of the front flooded swiftly over the landscape; there were interruptions of great violence, sometimes desultory, sometimes beginning, in obedience to a human will, at a certain hour.  The outbreak would commence with the orderliness