The American cars literally infest the roads in the day. They buzz along on calls to the _postes_, return from evacuations, and keep so busy trying to accelerate the work that a casual observer might imagine that a whole division had been annihilated overnight. A car with three stretcher-cases in the back, a slightly wounded soldier sitting on the seat next to the driver, and a load of knapsacks piled between the hood and the fenders, starts down from the _poste de secours_, spins on through a village full of resting troops, and turns on to the highway leading to the evacuation hospitals at the town eight kilometres below. At first the holes in the walls and houses along the way, and the craters in the fields where the _marmites_ had struck, made one continually conscious of the possibility of a shell. Now one does not think about it, save to note the new holes, observe that the older ones have been cemented up, and to hope that an _éclat_ won't hit you at those exceedingly rare times when a shell bursts ahead or behind. The closest call so far on that stretch of road was when a 210 hit eleven feet to the side of one of our cars, but failed to explode. Of course there is a chance that even at that distance the _éclat_ might take a peculiar course and miss one; but the chances are that if that shell had gone off one of our men would have been minus several necessary portions of his anatomy. The work at night is quite eerie, and on moonless nights quite difficult. No lights are allowed, and the inky black way ahead seems packed with a discordant jumble of sounds as the never-ending artillery and _ravitaillement_ trains rattle along. One creeps past convoy after convoy, past sentinels who cry, "_Halte là!_" and then whisper an apologetic "_Passez_" when they make out the ambulance; and it is only in the dazzling light of the illuminating rockets that shoot into the air and sink slowly over the trenches that one can see to proceed with any speed. It is at night, too, that our hardest work comes, for that is usually the time when attacks and counter-attacks are made and great numbers of men are wounded. Sometimes all twenty of the Section cars will be in service. It is then that one sees the most frightfully wounded: the men with legs and arms shot away, mangled faces, and hideous body wounds. It is a time when men die in the ambulances before they reach the hospitals, and I believe nearly every driver in the Section has had at least one distressing experience of that sort.