"And last night, there was a call for three cars at midnight. Didn't any of the wounded come this way? So-and-So had magneto trouble bringing back his first load. He said Henry Ford himself could not have started the boat. So the repair car went out at four o'clock this morning." "That boy certainly has his troubles. Do you remember the time he had two blow-outs and four punctures in twenty-four hours and then had all his brake-bands go at once? It was two miles he ran to get another car to take his wounded." "He looked low when he came in about breakfast time," somebody else will put in. "I tell you he _will_ use too much oil. It goes through these old cars like a dose of salts," a third will add. On bad days the discussion will go on this way until time for the next meal. But on clear days during summer and early autumn weather, we have stayed indoors very little. The air is champagne-like and the view on all sides magnificent. It is possible, also, from a number of these eminences to follow in a fascinating fashion the progress of artillery duels, and, with a good pair of glasses, even to see infantry advancing to the attack. When the cannonading is heavy the whole horizon pops and rumbles and from the sea of green mountains spread out before you rise puffs of shrapnel smoke, flaky little clouds about the size of a man's hand and pale against the tree-tops, as one thinks of death as pale. They hover, sometimes too many at a time to count, above the mountains and then sink down again into the general greenness. The sky, too, is generally dotted with these same little flaky clouds when aeroplanes are abroad. And aeroplanes are abroad every fair day, for they are seldom or never hit and brought down, although the anti-aircraft guns, especially when hedging them in with "barrier fire," seem to limit their activities. Soldiers, as I have said, march by these posts on their way to and from the trenches. Whenever they are allowed to break ranks near our cars they crowd around us with little bottles in their hands asking for gasoline to put in cigarette lighters which they make out of German bullets. Most of these men belong to battalions of Chasseurs Alpins, and I do not suppose there are any finer soldiers in the world than those stocky, merry-eyed men from the mountain provinces of France, with their picturesque caps and their dark-blue coats set off by their horison-blue trousers. They are called, indeed, the "blue devils," and when the _communiqués_ say, "After a heavy shelling of some of the enemy heights in the Vosges our infantry advanced to the attack and succeeded in taking so many of the enemy trenches," it is probably the Chasseurs Alpins who have led the way in the face of the hand-grenades and machine-gun fire and the streams of burning oil that, in this country especially, make the "meaning of a mile" so terrible.