he unlucky men of the ambulance. Whenever, by any
chance, any of us were missing late at night, it was always they. When
the wagons were full, the roads dusty or covered with sleet, it was
they too who failed to get a seat, and had to walk to town. When our
eatables had disappeared, or we had no wine or drink of any kind, they
were sure to come in hungry, thirsty and foot-sore from some distant
part of the field. At Champigny they slept on a billiard-table; upon
the Plateau d'Avron they just happened around when the Prussians began
the awful bombardment which obliged the French to scurry off, leaving
guns and stores. This, they said, was their worst day out, for they
half ran, half rolled down the hillside through a rain of shells,
about a hundred guns, they maintained, having been concentrated upon
that particular plateau. At Rueil one of them was just coming up to
get a cup of coffee when the shell struck our coffee-pot. I witnessed
the escape that time, and it did truly seem miraculous.

I think I may state it as a fact that if it had not been for the loss
of that coffee-pot we should never have eaten the cook's dog. It came
about in this natural--or perhaps I should say unnatural--way. In the
early days of the siege, you see, some poor wretch who lived near
our hospital possessed, as is almost always the case with a Frenchman
removed a quarter of a degree, say, above abject poverty, a favorite
dog. One day his beast and house were made glad by the appearance
of two pups. They were tawny, bright-eyed little fellows, and the
Frenchman loved them with a love that the Anglo-Saxon knows not of,
especially in the matter of dogs. Well, provisions got scarcer
and scarcer, and finally, with an anguish that I have no right to
ridicule, and as the only thing left for him to do, the poor Frenchman
brought his pups around and presented them to the cook of our
hospital. Here the little fellows waxed fat and strong, and were soon
great favorites, not only of the good-natured cook, but of all the
fellows of the ambulance. Perhaps you never saw a pot of horse-soup
boiling: if you have, you will never forget the great blotches of fat
that float upon the surface of it. Many skimmings of this did John
Cook, as we used to call our _chef_, put aside for the pups. In the
course of time, however, famine began to invade the ambulance. The
canned meat and the hams had long since disappeared; a horse belonging
to one of our corps, found overt