At B. we found an English Section that had been as suddenly displaced as our own. Every minute loaded _camions_ ground into town and disappeared towards the east, troops of all kinds came in, _flick, flack_, the sun shining on the barrels of the _lebels_, a train of giant mortars, mounted on titanic trucks and drawn by big motor lorries, crashed over the pavements and vanished somewhere. Some of our _conducteurs_ made friends with the English drivers, and swapped opinions as to what was in the wind. One heard, "Well, those Frenchies have got something up their sleeve. We were in the battle of Champagne, and it began just like this." A voice from our American West began, "Say--what kind of carburetors do you birds use?" New England asked, "How many cars have you got?" And London, on being shown the stretcher arrangements of our cars, exclaimed, "That ain't so dusty,--eh, wot?" Round us, rising to the full sea of the battle, the tide of war surged and disappeared. At dusk a company of dragoons, big helmeted men on big horses, trotted by, their blue mantles and mediæval casques giving them the air of crusaders. At night the important corners of the streets were lit with cloth transparencies, with "Verdun" and a great black arrow painted on them. Night and day, going as smoothly as if they were linked by an invisible chain, went the hundred convoys of motor lorries. There was a sense of something great in the air--a sense of apprehension. "_Les Boches vont attaquer Verdun._" IV On the 21st the order came to go to M. The _Boches_ had made their first attack that morning; this, however, we did not know. At M., a rather unlovely eighteenth-century château stands in a park built out on the meadows of the Meuse. The flooded river flowed round the dark pines. At night one could hear the water roaring under the bridges. The château, which had been a hospital since the beginning of the war, reeked with ether and iodoform; pasty-faced, tired attendants unloaded mud, cloth, bandages, and blood that turned out to be human beings; an over-wrought doctor-in-chief screamed contradictory orders at everybody, and flared into crises of hysterical rage. Ambulance after ambulance came from the lines full of clients; kindly hands pulled out the stretchers, and bore them to the wash-room. This was in the cellar of the dove-cote, in a kind of salt-shaker turret. _Snip, snap_ went the scissors of the _brancardiers_, who looked after the bath,--good souls these two; the uniforms were slit from mangled limbs. The wounded lay naked in their stretchers while the attendant daubed them with a hot soapy sponge; the blood ran from their wounds through the stretcher to the floor, and seeped into the cracks of the stones. A lean, bearded man, closed his eyes over the agony of his opened entrails and died there. I thought of Henner's dead Christ.