on the sidewalks before the cafes, or dancing with the girls in the parks.  Then a time came when the village streets were lonely and dark and we knew that the bugle had sounded taps.  And so in due course we came to the end of the day’s journey, at the end of a spur of the railroad, near one sector of the Verdun front.  There we found a field hospital of four thousand beds.  And when there is to be renewed French activity on the Verdun sector, the first thing that happens is the general evacuation of all the patients in the hospital.  It takes a great many railroad trains to clear out a hospital wherein six thousand wounded men are jammed.  We saw one hospital train loading.  This hospital had handled twenty-six hundred cases in one day the week before we arrived.  The big guns that we had heard booming away for three days as we went up and down the line had been grinding their awful grist.  We walked through the hospital, which covered acres of ground.  It is a board structure, some of the walls are not even papered, but show the two-by-fours nakedly and the rafters above.  Stoves heat most of the wards, and hospital linoleum covers the runways between the rows of beds.  Of course, the operating rooms are painted white and kept spotless.  The French are marvellous surgeons, and their results in turning men back to the line, both in per cent of men and time are up to the normal average of the war; but they are not so finical about flies and fresh air and unimportant dirt as the English or the Americans.  They probably feel that there are more essential things to consider than flies and their trysting places!  In this hospital we saw our first wounded German prisoners.  We saw boys fifteen years old, whose voices had not changed.  We saw men past fifty.  We saw slope-shouldered, hollow-chested, pale-faced men of the academic type, wearing glasses an eighth of an inch thick.  We saw scrubby looking men who seemed to “be the dirt and the dross, the dust and the scum of the earth.”

And we saw also some well-set-up Germans, and in a bull-pen near the railroad station waiting for the trains to take them to the interior of France were six thousand German prisoners—­for the most part well-made men.  Here and there was a scrub—­a boy, a defective, or an old man; showing that the Germans are working these classes through the army; but indicating, so far as one batch of prisoners from one part of the battle line may indicate, that the Germans still have a splendid fighting army.  But the old German army that came raging through Belgium and northern France in 1914 is gone.  Germany is well past the peak in man power, as shown in the soldiers of the line.  It is also likely that the morale of the German line has its best days behind it.  The American ambulance men in the Verdun sector told us of a company of German soldiers who had come across a few nights before to surrender, after killing their officers.  They appeared at about ten o’clock at night, and told the French