The firing is awfully heavy to-day.  They say it is the big French guns that have got up.  Two of our ambulances have had miraculous escapes after being hit.  Things happen too quickly to know how to describe them.  To-day when I went out to breakfast an old village woman aged about 70 was brought in wounded in two places.  I am not fond of horrors.

We have been given an empty house for the staff, the owners having quitted it in a panic and left everything, children’s toys on the carpet, and beds unmade.  The hospital is a college for priests, all of whom have fled.  Into this building the wounded are carried day and night, and the surgeons are working in shifts and can’t get the work done.  We are losing, alas! so many patients.  Nothing can be done for them, and I always feel so glad when they are gone.  I don’t think anyone can realise what it is to be just behind the line of battle, and I fear there would not be much recruiting if people at home could see our wards.  One can only be thankful for a hospital like this in the thick of things, for we are saving lives, and not only so, but saving the lives of men who perhaps have lain three days in a trench or a turnip-field undiscovered and forgotten.

As soon as a wounded man has been attended to and is able to be put on a stretcher again he is sent to Calais.  We have to keep emptying the wards for other patients to come in, and besides, if the fighting comes this way, we shall have to fall back a little further.

We have a river between us and the Germans, so we shall always know when they are coming and get a start and be all right.

Your loving
S. MACNAUGHTAN.

* * * * *

25 October.—­A glorious day.  Up in the blue even Taubes—­those birds of prey—­look beautiful, like eagles wheeling in their flight.  It is all far too lovely to leave, yet men are killing each other painfully with every day that dawns.

I had a tiresome day in spite of the weather, because the hospital was evacuated suddenly owing to the nearness of the Germans, and I missed going with the ambulance, so I hung about all day.

26 October.  My birthday.—­This morning several women were brought in horribly wounded.  One girl of sixteen had both legs smashed.  I was taking one old woman to the civil hospital and I had to pass eighteen dead men; they were laid out beside some women who were washing clothes, and I noticed how tired even in death their poor dirty feet looked.

[Page Heading:  TO THE EDGE OF THE FIGHTING LINE]

We started early in the ambulance to-day, and went to pick up the wounded.  It was a wild gusty morning, one of those days when the sky takes up nearly all the picture and the world looks small.  The mud was deep on the road, and a cyclist corps plunged heavily along through it.  The car steered badly and we drove to the edge of the fighting-line.