Nine doctors and fifteen nurses and many wounded were killed that night at Vlaincourt.  “And the French officer de liason between the French army and the American ambulance, what of him?” we asked.

“He slept in the hospital and was killed by a bomb,” answered the Frenchman.

So our serious faced French lieutenant knew all too well why “It is absolutely forbidden to laugh” in war!

CHAPTER III

IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR

There is something, though Heaven knows not much, to be said for war as war.  And the little to be said is said when one declares that it refreshes life by taking us out of our ruts.  Routine kills men and nations and races; it is stagnation.  But war shakes up society, puts men into strange environments, gives them new diversions, new aims, changed ideals.  In the faint breath of war that came to Henry and me, as we went about our daily task inspecting hospitals and first aid posts and ambulance units for the Red Cross, there was a tremendous whiff of the big change that must come to lives that really get into war as soldiers.  Even we were for ever pinching ourselves to see if we were dreaming, as we rode through the strange land, filled with warlike impedimenta, and devoted exclusively to the science of slaughter.  By rights we should have been sitting in our offices in Wichita and Emporia editing two country newspapers, wrangling mildly with the pirates of the paper mills to whom our miserable little forty or fifty carloads of white paper a year was a trifle, dickering with foreign advertisers who desired to spread before Wichita and Emporia the virtues of their chewing gum or talking machines, or discussing the ever changing Situation with the local statesmen.  At five o’clock Henry should be on his way to the Wichita golf course to reduce his figure, and the sullen roar of the muffler cut-out on the family car should be warning me that we were going to picnic that night out on the Osage hills in the sunset, where it would be up to me to eat gluten bread and avoid sugars, starches and fats to preserve the girlish lines of my figure.

But instead, here we were puffing up a hill in France, through underbrush, across shell holes to a hidden trench choked with telephone cables that should lead underground to an observation post where a part of the staff of the French army sat overlooking the battle of the Champagne.  As we puffed and huffed up the hill, we recalled to each other that we had been in our offices but a few weeks before when the Associated Press report had brought us the news of the Champagne drive for hill 208.  Among other things the report had declared “a number of French soldiers were ordered into their own barrage, and several were shot for refusing to go into action thereafter!” And now here we were looking through a peep-hole in the camouflage at the battlefield!  We were half