“Des Boches—­crossing the river.”

The regiment plodded on as before.  Now and then a soldier would stop and look up at the aeroplanes.

“He’s coming!” I heard a voice exclaim.

Suddenly, the adjutant whom I had seen before came galloping down the line, shouting, “Arretez!  Arretez!  Pas de mouvement!”

A current of tension ran down the troop with as much reality as a current of water runs down hill.  I wondered whether the Boche had seen us.

“Is he approaching?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Ahead of me was a one-horse wagon, and ahead of that a wagon with two horses carrying the medical supplies.  The driver of the latter, an oldish, thick-set, wine-faced fellow, got down an instant from his wagon, looked at the Boche, and resumed his seat.  A few seconds later, there sounded the terrifying scream of an air-bomb, a roar, and I found myself in a bitter swirl of smoke.  The shell had fallen right between the horses of the two-horse wagon, blowing the animals to pieces, splintering the wagon, and killing the driver.  Something sailed swiftly over my head, and landed just behind the ambulance.  It was a chunk of the skull of one of the horses.  The horse attached to the wagon ahead of me went into a frenzy of fear and backed his wagon into my ambulance, smashing the right lamp.  In the twinkling of an eye, the soldiers dispersed.  Some ran into the fields.  Others crouched in the wayside ditch.  A cart upset.  Another bomb dropped screaming in a field and burst; a cloud of smoke rolled away down the meadow.

When the excitement had subsided, it was found that a soldier had been wounded.  The bodies of the horses were rolled over into the ditch, the wreck of the wagon was dragged to the miry field, and the regiment went on.  In a very short time I got to the hospital and delivered my convalescents.

My way home ran through the town of S------, an ugly, overgrown village
of the Verdunois, given up to the activities of the staff directing the
battle.  The headquarters building was the hotel de ville, a large
eighteenth-century edifice, in an acre of trampled mud a little distance
from the street.  Before the building flowed the great highway from
Bar-le-Duc to Verdun; relays of motor lorries went by, and gendarmes,
organized into a kind of traffic squad, stood every hundred feet or so. 
The atmosphere of S------at the height of the battle was one of calm
organization; it would not have been hard to believe that the
motor-lorries and unemotional men were at the service of some great
master-work of engineering.  There was something of the holiday in the
attitude of the inhabitants of the place; they watched the motor show
exactly as they might have watched a circus parade.

“Les voila,” said somebody.