and usually without having
washed or changed for weeks. There are no women nurses in these
second-line ambulances, but all the army doctors we saw seemed
intelligent, and anxious to do the best they could for their men in
conditions of unusual hardship. The principal obstacle in their way
is the over-crowded state of the villages. Thousands of soldiers are
camped in all of them, in hygienic conditions that would be bad
enough for men in health; and there is also a great need for light
diet, since the hospital commissariat of the front apparently
supplies no invalid foods, and men burning with fever have to be fed
on meat and vegetables.

In the afternoon we started out again in a snow-storm, over a
desolate rolling country to the south of Verdun. The wind blew
fiercely across the whitened slopes, and no one was in sight but the
sentries marching up and down the railway lines, and an occasional
cavalryman patrolling the lonely road. Nothing can exceed the
mournfulness of this depopulated land: we might have been wandering
over the wilds of Poland. We ran some twenty miles down the
steel-grey Meuse to a village about four miles west of Les Eparges,
the spot where, for weeks past, a desperate struggle had been going
on. There must have been a lull in the fighting that day, for the
cannon had ceased; but the scene at the point where we left the
motor gave us the sense of being on the very edge of the conflict.
The long straggling village lay on the river, and the trampling of
cavalry and the hauling of guns had turned the land about it into a
mud-flat. Before the primitive cottage where the doctor's office had
been installed were the motors of the surgeon and the medical
inspector who had accompanied us. Near by stood the usual flock of
grey motor-vans, and all about was the coming and going of cavalry
remounts, the riding up of officers, the unloading of supplies, the
incessant activity of mud-splashed sergeants and men.

The main ambulance was in a grange, of which the two stories had
been partitioned off into wards. Under the cobwebby rafters the men
lay in rows on clean pallets, and big stoves made the rooms dry and
warm. But the great superiority of this ambulance was its nearness
to a canalboat which had been fitted up with hot douches. The boat
was spotlessly clean, and each cabin was shut off by a gay curtain
of red-flowered chintz. Those curtains must do almost as much as the
hot water to make over the _morale_