We have drawn our impressions of Alsace chiefly from five or six towns in a commercial valley. They are subject to long-range shelling and bombs dropped from aeroplanes. Indeed, my first day in Alsace was spent in the yard of a hospital contrived out of a schoolhouse. Our cars were parked beneath the windows of one of its wings, and all day long one heard the pitiful moans of a mother and her two little daughters who had been wounded the night before when the Germans had dropped half a dozen shells into the town where they lived. But these towns seem to be, on the whole, cheerful, prosperous places. Soldiers resting from the trenches flirt the time away with bilingual Alsatian girls. Horns, claxons, and the hum of motors make in the little mountain-smothered streets the noises of Broadway or Piccadilly. The cafés and stores are full from morning until eight o'clock, when all lights must be put out. Nothing is taken by the soldiery without being paid for, a fact that was brought sharply home to me on one occasion. We needed wood for the kitchen-fire of a little dressing-station hidden on a tree-covered mountain-top. I picked up an axe and started to get some exercise and the wood for the fire at the same time; but the cook excitedly told me that not even in that out-of-the-way place, unless he had the proper military authorization, would he dare cut down a tree, because the commune must be paid for, every twig of it. But, interesting as these towns are, it is beyond them that we do our most useful work. I am writing, as it happens, at a dressing-station between the artillery and the infantry lines where two of our cars are always on duty. The driver of the other car, eight months ago, was in charge of a cattle ranch in the Argentine, and last May, a passenger on the ill-fated Lusitania, was rescued after four hours in the water. He is on his back tightening bolts underneath his car, and a hole in the left sole of his projecting shoes tells of hours with the low speed jammed on, for this is the way we have to drive down as well as up hill.