taken directly to the rear of the trenches where the regimental cooks have their traveling kitchens.  Once the food is prepared, the cooks—­the beloved cuistots—­take it to the trenches in great, steaming kettles and distribute it to the men individually.  As for clothing, every regiment has a regimental tailor shop and supply of uniforms in the village where they go to repos.  I have often seen the soldier tailor of one of the regiments, a little Alsatian Jew, sewing up the shell rents in a comrade’s greatcoat.  He had his shop in a pleasant kitchen, and used to sit beside the fire sewing as calmly as an old woman.

The sanitary arrangements of the trenches are the usual army latrines, and very severe punishments are inflicted for any fouling.

If a man is wounded, the medical service man of his squad (infirmier), or one of the stretcher-bearers (brancardiers), takes him as quickly as possible to the regimental medical post in the rear lines.  If the trench is getting heavily shelled, and the wound is slight, the attendant takes the man to a shelter and applies first aid until a time comes when he and his patient can proceed to the rear with reasonable safety.  At this rear post the regimental surgeon cleans the wound, stops the bleeding, and sends for the ambulance, which, at the Bois-le-Pretre, came right into the heart of the trenches by sunken roads that were in reality broad trenches.  The man is then taken to the hospital that his condition requires, the slightly wounded to one hospital, and those requiring an operation to another.  The French surgical hospitals all along the front are marvels of cleanliness and order.  The heart of each hospital is the power plant, which sterilizes the water, runs the electric lights, and works the X-ray generator.  Mounted on an automobile body, it is always ready to decamp in case the locality gets too dangerous.  You find these great, lumbering affairs, half steamroller, half donkey-engine, in the courtyards of old castles, schools, and great private houses close by the front.

The first-line trenches, in a position at all contested, are very apt still to preserve the hurried arrangement of their first plan, which is sometimes hardly any plan at all.  It must be admitted that the Germans have the advantage in the great majority of places, for theirs was the first choice, and they entrenched themselves, as far as possible, along the crests of the eastern hills of France, in a line long prepared for just such an exigency.  It has been the frightfully difficult task of the Allies, these two years, not only to hold the positions at the foot of these hills, in which they were at a tactical disadvantage, all their movements being visible to the Boches on the crests above them, but also to attack an enemy entrenched in a strong position of his own choosing.  To-day at one point along the line, the French and Germans may share the dominating crest of a position, at another point, they may be equally matched, and at another, such as Les Eparges, the French, after fearful losses, have carried the coveted eminence.  One phase of the business of violence is the work of the military undertaker attached to each secteur, who writes down in his little red book the names of the day’s dead, and arranges for the wooden cross at the head of each fresh grave.  Every day along the front is a battle in which thousands of men die.