“Only bran?” we asked, doubting it.

“Only bran,” the interpreter repeated, and from half a dozen cots near by, where others who had suffered as he had, heard our question, came the echo of his confirmation, “Only bran to eat!” He soon caught cold, and soon the “cold” became tuberculosis, and after three years of this his sick days exceeded his work days, and in due course he and five hundred others were assembled, put on a train and shipped out of Germany through Switzerland to Evian in France.  Three hundred thousand of these poor husks, men, women, and children, have been dumped into France in the last seven months.  Two trainloads of them arrive at Evian every day.  The men and women, mostly tubercular, do not tarry.  They push on into France, a deadly white stream.

In time the week ended that marked our first trip to the French front.  During that week we lived almost entirely in the war zone, and under war conditions.  The food was good—­better than good, it was excellent, but not plentiful, and the beds were clean and full of sleep.  The only physical discomfort we found was in the lack of drinking water.  We were warned against all local water.

My feelings on the subject of the French coffee and milk were something like Henry’s antipathy to onion soup.  But we both loved water with our meals.  We had been vaccinated against typhoid, and we were rather insistent that we could drink any kind of water, if it was reasonably clean.  But men said “this country is no place to drink water.  It has been a battle-ground and a cemetery for three years.”  Still we insisted, and then, Mr. Norton, head of the American ambulance, told us this one:  “Out behind a barrage once near the Champagne; helping the stretcher bearers; nasty weather, rain, and cold.  But there we were.  We couldn’t get in.  We ducked from shell hole to shell hole.  Finally I found a nice deep one, with water in the bottom—­oh, maybe five feet of water in a fifteen foot hole, and I stayed there; two days and nights.  My canteen went dry, and for a day or two I scooped water out of the shell hole and drank it.  Good enough tasting water so far as that goes, and fresh too!  But at the end of the third day, I decided it wasn’t agreeing with me and quit.”

“Why?” we asked.  “Did you leave the shell hole?”

“No—­oh, no.  It was a good shell hole.  I stayed.  But you know Fritzie came up!” he answered.

So our taste for water with our meals, which is America’s choicest privilege, passed.  Henry could drink the coffee, but it didn’t taste good to me.  The brackish red wine they served with the army ration tasted like diluted vinegar and looked like pokeberry ink.  It seemed only good to put in our fountain pens.  A tablespoonful would last me all day.  Our week’s trip ended at Monter-en-Der, where there was a hotel and an Ambulance corps unit that had been over to visit the American troops and had brought back from the commissary department much loot.  Among other things was water—­bottled water, pure unfermented water.  And when we sat at table they brought me a bottle.