r with
outstretched arms would have done credit to native born Frenchmen.

As we approached the front, the long straight French roads gave way to
winding narrow ways, frequently paved with cobble stones called pave.
The country became flat, and the roadside ditches were filled to the
brim with water. That we were within the sphere of military operations
became more and more evident. Motor cars carrying officers passed
frequently; motor transports carrying food and fodder rumbled along
the roads or were parked in the outskirts of villages or in village
squares; motor ambulance convoys were drawn up in front of hospitals,
and, in general, we felt that we were nearing the real seat of
operations, the front line.

It was a drive of a hundred miles to the little town which was to be
our headquarters for nine long months, and I remember the thrill that
I had when we first saw the effects of shell fire--a hole about two
feet in diameter in the bricks above the door of the Hotel de Ville.
As we later discovered, the village authorities had decided not to
repair that hole but to leave it as a memorial of the day when the
Germans had been driven from the town and had fired some shells back
into it, killing a dozen of the inhabitants.

After reporting to the corps headquarters in town, we were instructed
to attach ourselves to No. 7 Clearing Hospital, where we were made
most welcome by the commanding officer and his staff. Colonel Wear
found billets for us in the town, and a splendid room for a laboratory
in the Hotel De Ville. This room, 22 x 36 feet, had been the banquet
hall and band room, and was well lighted by windows and gas. When
equipped as a laboratory it presented a most imposing appearance, and
from it we had a fine view of the village square, commonly called the
Grande Place. As everything going through the town had to pass by our
windows in order to cross the bridges over the canals, we could view a
continuous panorama of never-failing interest whenever we had the
leisure to look down upon it.

Captain Rankin found his billet at the top of a house on the opposite
side of the square from the laboratory; Captain Ellis found his in a
house in the corner of the square, and mine proved to be a little room
over a grocery shop on another corner of the square. My room was
reached by passing through the shop, up a very steep staircase, and
through a storeroom filled with boxes of soap, biscuits, bundles of
brooms, and ot