the open
country out of the range of bullets, but not outside the range of
shells. Here the munition caissons and the transport wagons come up
by night bringing the food for men and guns which is taken up to the
hungry mouths under the cover of darkness; and here, on an average
day, one will occasionally observe the passing of an ambulance with
its green roof and sides which melts it into the road and the
landscape--and processions of ambulances when there is battle. All
the detail of army existence is as precise as that of the best
organized industrial plant.

As you walk along you will spy at intervals a hidden battery,
perhaps in a house, perhaps in a hedge, perhaps in a group of trees,
perhaps beautifully roofed over with sod, so that it is invisible
from the air. You rarely look up without seeing an aeroplane flying
overhead. When there is action, you will see many. A faint pur comes
out of the heavens and two planes are seen circling as they exchange
bullets from their machine guns. Another plane is turning to the
right and left and ducking to avoid the thistle blows of smoke which
burst from the shrapnel shells fired by the antiaircraft guns.

Follow the course of the long procession of motor trucks which feed
the army and you arrive at one of the great supply depots which
every day send out the precise quota of supplies that are needed,
with every motor truck having its schedule and keeping that schedule
with the accuracy of a first-class passenger train. Follow the
ambulances back from station to station, where the wounded men are
examined to see if they are suffering from a hemorrhage and whether
they are able to stand the farther journey and do not need an
immediate operation, and you are brought to the immense base
hospitals in a closely guarded and well ordered camp where every
sanitary tradition known to modern life is absolutely enforced. One
of these hospitals had twelve thousand beds and in the offensive of
September 25, 1915, it discharged seven thousand patients in a day.

Soldiers are restricted to the neighborhood of their billets and
officers themselves must have passes if they travel outside the
region occupied by their battalions. Everyone is a policeman under
an intricate system guarding every detail of army secrets from any
spy and from those gallant aviators who risk antiaircraft gunfire in
the hope of bringing home some information to their side.

Never has the Intelligence Service of an