village to the north of Verdun, not far from the enemy’s lines at Cosenvoye, and was fairly representative of all the others.  The dreary muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulance had been installed at haphazard in such houses as the military authorities could spare.  The arrangements were primitive but clean, and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms.  The men lay on mattresses or in wooden cots, and the rooms were heated by stoves.  The great need, here as everywhere, was for blankets and clean underclothing; for the wounded are brought in from the front encrusted with frozen mud, and usually without having washed or changed for weeks.  There are no women nurses in these second-line ambulances, but all the army doctors we saw seemed intelligent, and anxious to do the best they could for their men in conditions of unusual hardship.  The principal obstacle in their way is the over-crowded state of the villages.  Thousands of soldiers are camped in all of them, in hygienic conditions that would be bad enough for men in health; and there is also a great need for light diet, since the hospital commissariat of the front apparently supplies no invalid foods, and men burning with fever have to be fed on meat and vegetables.

In the afternoon we started out again in a snow-storm, over a desolate rolling country to the south of Verdun.  The wind blew fiercely across the whitened slopes, and no one was in sight but the sentries marching up and down the railway lines, and an occasional cavalryman patrolling the lonely road.  Nothing can exceed the mournfulness of this depopulated land:  we might have been wandering over the wilds of Poland.  We ran some twenty miles down the steel-grey Meuse to a village about four miles west of Les Eparges, the spot where, for weeks past, a desperate struggle had been going on.  There must have been a lull in the fighting that day, for the cannon had ceased; but the scene at the point where we left the motor gave us the sense of being on the very edge of the conflict.  The long straggling village lay on the river, and the trampling of cavalry and the hauling of guns had turned the land about it into a mud-flat.  Before the primitive cottage where the doctor’s office had been installed were the motors of the surgeon and the medical inspector who had accompanied us.  Near by stood the usual flock of grey motor-vans, and all about was the coming and going of cavalry remounts, the riding up of officers, the unloading of supplies, the incessant activity of mud-splashed sergeants and men.

The main ambulance was in a grange, of which the two stories had been partitioned off into wards.  Under the cobwebby rafters the men lay in rows on clean pallets, and big stoves made the rooms dry and warm.  But the great superiority of this ambulance was its nearness to a canalboat which had been fitted up with hot douches.  The boat was spotlessly clean, and each cabin was shut off by a gay curtain of red-flowered chintz.  Those curtains must do almost as much as the hot water to make over the morale of the men:  they were the most comforting sight of the day.