Such a place is a mountain-top at which we feel almost as much at home as at our base, for eight of our cars are always on duty at this place, each man serving for a week at a time, and one man being relieved every day. It is one of those plateau-shaped eminences which are mentioned in geographies as distinguishing the Vosges from the Alps and the Pyrenees. It is treeless through exposure to the wind, and its brow slopes gradually towards the French side, with a succession of cuplike hollows tenanted by brush-covered bomb-proofs and dug-outs and horse-sheds. Other than topographical concealments are also employed; gray horses are dyed brown and groups of road-builders when at work in some particularly exposed place carry, like the army that went against Macbeth, umbrellas of branches. We are housed here in a long, low shack built against the side of the crest. Violent storms sometimes take the roof off this shack with the consequent drenching of the surgeon in charge, ourselves, a half-dozen stretcher-bearers and as many mule-drivers. Bunks are built crosswise against the side of the walls, and over some of these bunks the words "_Pour Intransportables_" are written. The rest, however, are occupied by people on duty here, for it is merely a relay-point, and the wounded, unless unable to stand a further journey or arriving by mules in numbers greater than we can handle, are merely changed from one mode of conveyance to another and given such attention in passing as they may need. When one of the beds for _intransportables_ is occupied, it generally means that the man dies in a few days and is buried close by, a corporal of stretcher-bearers, who was before the war a Roman Catholic missionary in Ceylon, borrowing from one of us a camera to take for the dead man's family a photograph of the isolated grave marked with one of those simple wooden crosses from which no mile of northern France is free. Deaths of this sort are peculiarly sad. Anybody who has nursed in the wards of a military hospital will tell you how soldiers, seasoned in trenches that high explosives and mines and hand-grenades have turned into shambles, will grow gloomy when one man in their ward dies. It is the same way with these single deaths and lonely funerals at the front.