These bearers wear a red cross on the arm, are non-combatant troops and carry no rifles. Each two of them carry a stretcher, and all of them carry a little haversack slung over the shoulder and filled with large and small surgical dressings, bandages, scissors, splints, and perhaps a bottle of iodine. Being non-combatant troops they are supposed to be allowed to carry out their work in comparative safety, but they really run the same risks as the combatants. This is to be expected in severe actions, for a machine-gunner or artilleryman cannot even try to avoid the stretcher bearers when they are mixed up, as they always are, with the fighting troops. But, at any rate, the Germans get the reputation of caring as little for red crosses or white flags as they do for scraps of paper. One afternoon I stood in a trench one-quarter mile from Willerval which was held by our troops, and in the ruins of which there was an advanced dressing station of a field ambulance. For some reason two ambulances came over the crest of Vimy Ridge in broad daylight, in plain view of the Germans, and ran rapidly down into Willerval. They arrived without mishap, but one-half hour later I saw them start back over the ridge a few minutes apart. The first one had got one-half way up the steep side of the ridge when a heavy German shell lit thirty feet behind it. And then shell after shell dropped behind it all the way up the steep slope. Fortunately the gunner's aim was short, for the car disappeared from view over the crest. Then the second car made the trip, the German shells falling behind it just as they had with the first one. They both got out in safety, but no thanks were due to the Huns who had done their best to get them with heavy shells. That was one instance in which I saw the Germans shell two ambulances which could not have been mistaken for any other type of vehicle. Suppose a soldier is hit by a piece of shell or sniper's bullet while he is in a trench which his battalion is holding. He is first attended by the stretcher bearer nearest to him at the time, who should use the man's own aseptic dressing which each soldier is compelled to carry in the lining of his coat or tunic. The injured man is then taken to the dugout of the M.O., if necessary on a stretcher, where the M.O. rearranges the dressing, gives a dose of morphine if pain is severe, and after seeing that all hemorrhage is stopped and the man is comfortable, he hands the case over to the field ambulance stretcher bearers who always serve him and live in an adjoining dugout. This squad carries the case back--through the trenches if there is no hurry, but overland if haste is important--to the advanced dressing station of the field ambulance. If this should be a particularly hard trip it may be done in relays. For there relay post dugouts are established with other bearer squads.