strong position on a rocky spur, had been almost impregnably fortified; but the attack we looked on at from the garden of Clermont, on Sunday, February 28th, carried the victorious French troops to the top of the ridge, and made them masters of a part of the village.  Driven from it again that night, they were to retake it after a five days’ struggle of exceptional violence and prodigal heroism, and are now securely established there in a position described as “of vital importance to the operations.”  “But what it cost!” Soeur Gabrielle said, when we saw her again a few days later.

II

The time had come to remember our promise and hurry away from Clermont; but a few miles farther our attention was arrested by the sight of the Red Cross over a village house.  The house was little more than a hovel, the village—­Blercourt it was called—­a mere hamlet of scattered cottages and cow-stables:  a place so easily overlooked that it seemed likely our supplies might be needed there.

An orderly went to find the medecin-chef, and we waded after him through the mud to one after another of the cottages in which, with admirable ingenuity, he had managed to create out of next to nothing the indispensable requirements of a second-line ambulance:  sterilizing and disinfecting appliances, a bandage-room, a pharmacy, a well-filled wood-shed, and a clean kitchen in which “tisanes” were brewing over a cheerful fire.  A detachment of cavalry was quartered in the village, which the trampling of hoofs had turned into a great morass, and as we picked our way from cottage to cottage in the doctor’s wake he told us of the expedients to which he had been put to secure even the few hovels into which his patients were crowded.  It was a complaint we were often to hear repeated along this line of the front, where troops and wounded are packed in thousands into villages meant to house four or five hundred; and we admired the skill and devotion with which he had dealt with the difficulty, and managed to lodge his patients decently.

We came back to the high-road, and he asked us if we should like to see the church.  It was about three o’clock, and in the low porch the cure was ringing the bell for vespers.  We pushed open the inner doors and went in.  The church was without aisles, and down the nave stood four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets.  In almost every one lay a soldier—­the doctor’s “worst cases”—­few of them wounded, the greater number stricken with fever, bronchitis, frost-bite, pleurisy, or some other form of trench-sickness too severe to permit of their being carried farther from the front.  One or two heads turned on the pillows as we entered, but for the most part the men did not move.