Away from our base, in our nomadic dressing-station-to-hospital existence, we are often pretty much "on our own." This part of our life begins in a valley reached through a famous pass. Starting from the valley of the Moselle easy grades along a splendid highway crowded with trucks, staff cars, wine carts, and long lines of yellow hay wagons, bring one to a tunnel about three hundred yards in length. In the middle of this tunnel is a low white marble stone with a rounded top that until a year ago last August marked the boundary between France and Germany. To an American driving an automobile in the dim tunnel light this stone is simply something not to be hit. To the French who have fought so bravely that it may no longer stand for a boundary it is a sacred symbol. I have seen the eyes of returning wounded glisten at the sight of it. I have heard companies of chasseurs, as they passed it going to the trenches, break into singing or whistling their famous Sidi-Brahim march. Beyond this tunnel the road, wrapping itself around the mountain like a broad, shining ribbon, descends into a fertile commercial valley in sweeping curves sometimes a kilometre long: on one side are high gray rocks where reservists seem to hang by their teeth and break stones; on the other, a sheer drop into green fields, behind the tunnel-pierced summit, in front the red-roofed houses of several Alsatian villages nestling against yet another line of mountain-tops. And along this road we have made our way at midnight, at daybreak, in the late afternoon, running cautiously with wounded and running carelessly empty. We are at home, too, in the villages to which it leads, with the life-size portrayals of the Crucifixion that are everywhere, even in fields and nailed to trees in the mountains, with the gray stone churches and their curious onion-shaped towers and clamorous bells. The appearance of an American Ambulance in the villages is no longer a novelty, sentries let us pass without a challenge, school children do not any more rush over to us at recess time, or soldiers crowd around us and say to one another, "_Voilà la voiture américaine_." And we have friends everywhere: the officer who wants to speak English and invites us so often to lunch with him, the corporal of engineers who was a well-known professor, the receiving sergeant who was a waiter at the Savoy Hotel in London, the _infirmier_ who was in charge of the French department of one of the largest of New York's publishing houses.