PAGE Samuel Cranston Benson _Frontispiece_ American Ambulance Headquarters, Neuilly, France 22 Ambulance Ready to Leave for the Front 22 An American Woman Caring for a Little Wounded French Child 38 An American Ambulance Ready for Duty 60 American Ambulances on the Road to the Front 80 Allied Troops Charging Through Barbed-Wire Entanglements 102 A Dressing Station Set Up on Newly Captured Ground 120 A Hurry Call 134 "Jumbo," the Biggest Ambulance on the Western Front 134 The Burning of a French Field Hospital 170 Ambulance Men Working Over a "Gassed" Soldier 225 Destruction of a French Hospital by a German Bomb 238 American Hospital at Neuilly Transferred to General Pershing 246 "Back From Hell" CHAPTER I A FORMER PACIFIST When the old _Chicago_ cut loose from her moorings in an Atlantic port it was a red letter day for me. She was a good sized craft, of the French Line, and was to carry a lot of other Americans, besides myself, from the United States to France. We were all in a spirit of expectancy, mingled perhaps with sadness, for we were going over to see and have a hand in the most stupendous event of history, the Great War. Although many different motives actuated us, our destination was the same, and all of us would soon be within striking distance of the scene of action. Some of those on board were going primarily from a sense of duty and gratitude to the great European Republic, whose men had come over here in '76 to help America kick off the chains which George III had welded on her ankles, and secondarily, because they wanted to kill a few of the Germans whom they right well hated. Others were going, and made no bones about saying so, because they were natural born soldiers of fortune and were inclined to go anywhere that action and excitement were likely to be found. A few were to be mere onlookers who were crossing the sea as students of a great world movement, who, from an economic or social point of view, would tabulate in a cold and matter-of-course way, the facts which they observed and the conclusions to which they came. I belonged to neither of these classes. I was an innocent idealist, though soon, alas, to be disillusioned. I had resigned a comfortable pastorate in order to go over and, as I conceived of it, relieve the pain and soothe the fevered brow of those who were in suffering, irrespective of whether they were Allies or Germans, and thus help usher in a world Utopia.