Day after day, night after night, wounded or no wounded, the little ambulances plied with their solitary drivers. Few men in ordinary autos or in ordinary senses travel such roads by choice, but all that is impossible is explained by a simple _C'est la guerre_. Why else blindly force and scrape one's way past a creaking truck of shells testing twenty horses, two abreast, steaming in their own cloud of sweaty vapor, thick as a Fundy fog? Taking perforce the outside, the ravine side, the ambulance passes. More horses and wagons ahead in the dark, another blinding moment or two, harnesses clash and rattle, side bolts and lanterns are wiped from the car. It passes again; _C'est la guerre_. Why else descend endless slopes with every brake afire, with three or four human bodies as they should not be, for cargo, where a broken drive-shaft leaves but one instantaneous twist of the wheel for salvation, a thrust straight into the bank, smashing the car, but saving its precious load? _C'est la guerre._ The men in time grow tired as do the machines. A week before Christmas they rested quietly in their villages--a week of sun and splendid moon, spent tuning up their motors and gears and jogging about afoot after all their "rolling." A lull in the fighting, and after three weeks of solid rain, nature smiles. The Section had been ordered to leave shortly, and it was only held for a long-expected attack which would bring them all together for once on the mountains in a last great effort with the Chasseurs Alpins and the mountains they both loved. On December 21st the mountain spoke and all the cars rolled upwards to the _poste_ of Hartmannsweilerkopf,--taken and retaken a score of times,--a bare, brown, blunt, shell-ploughed top where before the forest stood, up elbowing, buffeting, and tacking their way through battalions of men and beasts, up by one pass and down by another unmountable (for there is no going back against the tide of what was battle-bound). From one mountain slope to another roared all the lungs of war. For five days and five nights--scraps of days, the shortest of the year, nights interminable--the air was shredded with shrieking shells--intermittent lulls for slaughter in attack after the bombardment, then again the roar of the counter-attack.