to the mechanical department, he
had volunteered for this most tiresome and disagreeable task. There is
not a single driver in Section II who does not owe much to the friendly
counsel, splendid courage, and keen mind of George Roeder.

A few miles below Verdun, on a narrow strip of meadowland between the
river and the northern bluffs, stood an eighteenth-century chateau and
the half-dozen houses of its dependents. The hurrying river had flooded
the low fields and then retreated, turning the meadows and pasturages to
bright green, puddly marshes, malodorous with swampy exhalations. Beyond
the swirls and currents of the river and its vanishing islands of
pale-green pebbles, rose the brown, deserted hills of the Hauts de
Meuse. The top of one height had been pinched into the rectangle of a
fortress; little forests ran along the sky-line of the heights, and a
narrow road, slanting across a spur of the valley, climbed and
disappeared.

The chateau itself was a huge, three-story box of gray-white stone with
a slate roof, a little turret en poivriere at each corner, and a
graceless classic doorway in the principal facade. A wide double gate,
with a coronet in a tarnished gold medallion set in the iron arch-piece,
gave entrance to this place through a kind of courtyard formed by the
rear of the chateau and the walls of two low wings devoted to the
stables and the servants' quarters. Within, a high clump of dark- green
myrtle, ringed with muddy, rut-scarred turf, marked the theoretical
limits of a driveway. Along the right-hand wall stood the rifles of the
wounded, and in a corner, a great snarled pile of bayonets, belts,
cartridge-boxes, gas-mask satchels, greasy tin boxes of anti-lice
ointment, and dented helmets. A bright winter sunlight fell on walls
dank from the river mists, and heightened the austerity of the
landscape. Beyond a bend in the river lay the smoke of the battle of
Douaumont; shells broke, pin-points of light, in the upper fringes of
the haze.

The chateau had been a hospital since the beginning of the war. A heavy
smell of ether and iodoform lay about it, mixed with the smell of the
war. This effluvia of an army, mixed with the sharper reek of
anaesthetics, was the atmosphere of the hospital. The great rush of
wounded had begun. Every few minutes the ambulances slopped down a miry
byway, and turned in the gates; tired, putty-faced hospital attendants
took out the stretchers and the nouveaux clients; mussy