One half the company is quartered at the farm. A stroke of luck enabled me to snatch a good four hours' sleep in the hay. Of course there was bound to be one fly in the amber. Our barn, big and lofty, was a veritable trap for draughts. Moreover, the noise of a continual coming and going, quarrels among the men regarding their respective berths, or a lost water-bottle, or a rifle that had been substituted for another one, created an unceasing din hardly propitious to sleep. With the dawn we march back to our meadow. Once more we wait and wait, with nothing to do, knowing nothing. Ten o'clock! An order comes to hand: "The men must get their food now or not at all, and be ready to move at a moment's notice." The cooks are in a very bad temper because the haricot beans, defying all efforts and coaxings, remain obdurately hard. "Not worth while making oneself ill with such stuff! They would blow out a wooden horse!" "Of course if the men don't mind chewing shrapnel!" I advise my men to cook what meat they have, so that, if necessary, it can be eaten on the road as we go along. It appears I was wise in my generation, for very shortly the "Fall in!" sounds, and we set off at once, evidently in the direction of Mouilly. It is odd, but we cannot hear the faintest sound of fighting, not even the snap of a rifle or the boom of a gun. Yet over the hilltop there comes at a trot towards us a non-commissioned officer of mounted chasseurs, his head swathed in blood-stained bandages. Although rather pale, he sits erect in his saddle and smiles cheerfully. "Hit?" someone calls out. "Nothing to talk about. A shell splinter shaved my head." Questions follow him along the road. "Is it very unhealthy over there?" "A little, my son. Just wait five minutes and you will have something to show as good as anything you will find at Mouilly!" Down in the village Red Cross officers are fussing about. We meet two motor-cars travelling at full speed and raising a suffocating cloud of dust. Wounded men drag themselves along, without equipment or rifles, their chests bare, uniforms tattered, hair wet with perspiration, white-cheeked and bloodstained. They have improvised bandages out of their handkerchiefs, shirt-sleeves or towels. They walk stoopingly, heads bent, hunched to one side, by reason of broken shoulders or arms that hang listless and heavy. Some are crawling, some are hopping on one foot, some with the aid of two sticks drag behind them a lifeless limb, smothered in bandages. There are faces so swathed that only the eyes appear, feverish and distressed; others in which only one eye is visible, the other hidden beneath dressings through which the blood percolates and trickles down bristly chins. And here are two wounded men on stretchers, their faces waxlike and shrunken, nostrils pinched, eyes closed and shadowed, bloodless hands clutching the sides of the ambulance; behind them huge drops mark their course through the dust.