When a group of men are on duty at an isolated _poste de secours_ like this, they take turns in carrying the wounded who may arrive, the man who has made the last trip going to the bottom of the list. And there is something comfortable about feeling that you are the last to "roll" on a stormy night when every plank in the little hut rattles and groans, when the wind shrieks in the desolate outside, when the sinister glare of the trench rockets gleams through the heavy blackness like a flash of lightning, and the wet mule-drivers who borrow a little of your fire shake their heads and pointing towards the road say, "_Un mauvais chemin_" And then, as you settle a little deeper in your blankets and blow out your lantern and assure yourself for the last time as to where your matches are and how much gasoline you have in your tank, you are pretty apt to think, before you go to sleep, of the men a little way off in the rain-soaked trenches. They are certainly not very far away. Only over there on the next ridge where the shells are exploding. They have been there, you know, without relief for ten days. You remember when they marched up the mountain to take their turn. How cheery and soldierlike they were! Not one of them, like you, is sleeping in blankets. They won't, like you, go back to-morrow to a pleasant dinner, with pleasant friends, in a pleasant hotel, and out of sound, too, of those awful guns. Some will come back and you will carry them in your ambulance. And some will never come back at all. Well.... "Did I leave that spark-plug wrench under the car? God knows I can never find it on a night like this and I change a plug every trip!" "Wake up! Don't talk in your sleep!" "What, is it my turn to roll? Wounded?" "No, Steve is _en panne_ halfway down the mountain." And you begin to take things in with one of the Section's _sous-chefs_ leaning over your cot with the news that the first man on the list has a load of wounded and has met with an accident. The others are waked up too. Some are left to take care of such other wounded as may arrive and the rest form a rescue party. Two ride in the rescue ambulance; two more probably walk. The wounded are moved from the broken-down car to the other ambulance, and then daylight finds three or four of us rain-drenched and mud-smeared, changing a brake-band or digging into a carburetor. The arrival of the relieving car at one of those posts on a rainy day, when every one of us is to be found within twenty feet of the stove, means a demand in chorus for mail and after that for news, especially Section gossip from Headquarters, which means who has had to wash cars and who has broken down _en route_. "Number 52 runs like a breeze now. I drove it yesterday and it climbed the _col_ on high with two wounded," the newcomer will say, producing some contribution to the mess.