Frenchmen pick them up:  just bring me along the compound fractures.”  These latter were his hobby.  He fairly doted on a man whom ordinary surgeons would have given up in despair; and I believe he was the happiest man in Paris when the first patient who had his leg shattered in a half dozen places began hobbling about the camp on crutches.  The soldiers got to hear of him at last.  More than one poor fellow lying on the field grievously wounded swore he would be taken to no place but to the American hospital.

Our next important sortie was at Champigny.  That was the occasion when Ducrot was surely going to push through the German lines.  In his proclamation he had announced that he would re-enter Paris victorious or dead.  Of course he did not keep his promise.  We were all to rendezvous at the Champs de Mars that morning at four o’clock.  About three of the same morning Mont Valerien opened fire, and then Issy, then Vanves, then Mont Rouge, and so the flash and roar of cannon went round the whole city.  That was our reveille.  It was cold, very cold, that morning, and we waited at the rendezvous a long time in company with the French, Italian, Swiss and other ambulance corps.  The great Doctor Ricord was there, and some of us heard then for the first time that he is an American from Baltimore.  Chenu, Nellaton and several other famous surgeons were also there, shivering with us as we waited and waited for the push through the lines, which never came.  Well, when at last the fight did occur, it made plenty of work for our wagons.  For the next two days they were constantly going to and fro between the field and our hospital.  Everywhere we went along the lines now we were recognized and made way for.  One night, as one of our wagons was trying to cross the field, it was halted with the question, “What ambulance is that?”

“Is it necessary to ask?” shouted a French soldier out of the darkness.  “It is the Americans’, of course:  they are everywhere.”

At this sortie there rode with us a little French abbe, whom some of the boys had picked up weeks before roaming about the outposts among the trenches.  He had won their hearts by his utter contempt of fire as he prayed with and confessed everybody he could lay hands on.  At the sortie of Chatillon he had discovered one of our corps bringing in to the wagons at the risk of his life a huge pumpkin.  The abbe imagined that Americans must set great value upon pumpkins if they were willing to secure them at such hazard, and he described the whole incident in L’Univers, the ultra-Catholic paper of Paris.  In the course of a few days the ambulance Americaine received two or three polite notes from religious French maiden ladies, saying that they had a few pumpkins which were at the service of the gentlemen of the corps.  We received the pumpkins, and skirmished for the ingredients of pumpkin-pie, which the matron of our hospital baked for us.  This was an unknown use for pumpkins in France, and those pies cost about their weight in silver.  Sugar we had—­it was the eggs that cost.  Horsemeat and pumpkin-pie!  There was a wild extravagance in that dinner, but then it was patriotic—­at least the dessert was.