The chateau had been a hospital since the beginning of the war.  A heavy smell of ether and iodoform lay about it, mixed with the smell of the war.  This effluvia of an army, mixed with the sharper reek of anaesthetics, was the atmosphere of the hospital.  The great rush of wounded had begun.  Every few minutes the ambulances slopped down a miry byway, and turned in the gates; tired, putty-faced hospital attendants took out the stretchers and the nouveaux clients; mussy bundles of blue rags and bloody blankets turned into human beings; an overworked, nervous medecin chef shouted contradictory orders at the brancardiers, and passed into real crises of hysterical rage.

“Avancez!” he would scream at the bewildered chauffeurs of the ambulances; and an instant later, “Reculez!  Reculez!”

The wounded in the stretchers, strewn along the edges of the driveway, raised patient, tired eyes at his snarling.

Another doctor, a little bearded man wearing a white apron and the red velvet kepi of an army physician, questioned each batch of new arrivals.  Deep lines of fatigue had traced themselves under his kindly eyes; his thin face had a dreadful color.  Some of the wounded had turned their eyes from the sun; others, too weak to move, lay stonily blinking.  Almost expressionless, silent, they resigned themselves to the attendants as if these men were the deaf ministers of some inexorable power.

The surgeon went from stretcher to stretcher looking at the diagnosis cards attached at the poste de secours, stopping occasionally to ask the fatal question, “As-tu crache du sang?” (Have you spit blood?) A thin oldish man with a face full of hollows like that of an old horse, answered “Oui,” faintly.  Close by, an artilleryman, whose cannon had burst, looked with calm brown eyes out of a cooked and bluish face.  Another, with a soldier’s tunic thrown capewise over his naked torso, trembled in his thin blanket, and from the edges of a cotton and lint-pad dressing hastily stuffed upon a shoulder wound, an occasional drop of blood slid down his lean chest.

A little to one side, the cooks of the hospital, in their greasy aprons, watched the performance with a certain calm interest.  In a few minutes the wounded were sorted and sent to the various wards.  I was ordered to take three men who had been successfully operated on to the barracks for convalescents several miles away.

A highway and an unused railroad, both under heavy fire from German guns on the Hauts de Meuse, passed behind the chateau and along the foot of the bluffs.  There were a hundred shell holes in the marshes between the road and the river, black-lipped craters in the sedgy green; there were ugly punches in the brown earth of the bluffs, and deep scoops in the surface of the road.  The telephone wires, cut by shell fragments, fell in stiff, draping lines to the ground.  Every once in a while a shell would fall into the river, causing a silvery gray geyser to hang for an instant above the green eddies of the Meuse.  A certain village along this highway was the focal point of the firing.  Many of the houses had been blown to pieces, and fragments of red tile, bits of shiny glass, and lumps of masonry were strewn all over the deserted street.