Every ambulance-driver must have his bad quarters of an hour, no doubt--and some of the worst of them may concern, not himself at all, but his car or his wounded. And if it is said that these young Americans, amateurs and volunteers, have acquitted themselves well in sometimes trying circumstances, there is no intention to over-emphasize this aspect of their service. A volume might be written on the developmental reactions--all but mathematical in their working--of war-time. Nor does it seem necessary to add that the risk of the _ambulanciers_, at the worst, is small in comparison with that of those whom they serve, and from whom in turn they get their inspiration--the intrepid youths in the trenches. We came to know these youths very well--the gallant and charming _poilus_ who have so long carried the western front upon their shoulders. We sincerely admired them; and on them largely we formed our opinions of France, and of the war generally, and of war. [Illustration: AN AMERICAN AMBULANCE IN FLANDERS] From the standpoint of observation, indeed,--and doubtless it is observation one should try to record here,--I believe we all felt the peculiar advantage of our position to have been this, that we mingled with the soldiers on something like equal terms. We were not officers; we were not distinguished visitors dashing up in a staff-car for an hour of sight-seeing. We were rankers (so far as we were anything), and we were permanent; and in the necessities of our work, we touched the life of the common fighting man at every hour of the day and night, and under almost every conceivable circumstance. We were with the _poilus_ in the hour of rout and disaster; we were with them in the flush of a victorious charge brilliantly executed. We crawled along roads blocked for miles with them, moving forward; we wormed into railroad stations swamped with the tide of their wounded. Now we heard their boyish fun, and shared their jokes in the fine free days off duty; and now we heard, from the unseen well of the jolting car, their faint entreaty, _Doucement, doucement!_ We saw them distressed by the loss of their precious _sacs_, or elated by the gift of a button or a cheese; we saw them again, in silence and the darkness beside the Yser, very quiet and busy, with the ping and whine of many rifles; and again we found them lying on straw in dim-lit stables, bloody and silent, but not defeated. Now they gave us tobacco and souvenirs, and told us of their _gosses_, and helped us tinker with our cars, about which some of them, mechanicians in happier days, knew so much more than we did; and now they died in our ambulances, and sometimes went mad. We saw them gay, and we saw them gassed; we found them idling or writing letters on the running-boards of our cars, and we found the dark stains of their fading lives upon our stretchers; we passed them stealing up like stalwart ghosts to action, and we left them lying in long brown rows