This is the story of the American Ambulance Field Service in the words of the boys themselves who drove the cars. Fresh to their experience, they jotted down the things that happened to them in this strange new life of war. These notes, sometimes in pencil, sometimes written with the pocket fountain pen, they sent to their chief, Piatt Andrew, and he has placed these unpublished day-by-day records of two hundred men at my disposal. Anybody would be stupid who tried to rewrite their reports. I am simply passing along what they say. One section of the Field Service with twenty cars was thrown out into Alsace for the campaign on the crest of Hartmannsweilerkopf. Here is some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Hartmannsweilerkopf is the last mountain before the Plain of the Rhine, and commands that valley. The hill crest was taken and retaken. Here, too, is the one sector of the Western Front where the French are fighting in the enemy's country. Alsace has been German territory for forty-three years. The district known as Haute Alsace is a range of mountains, running roughly north and south; to the east lies German Alsace, to the west the level country of French Alsace. On the crest of the mountains the armies of France and Germany have faced each other. The business of the ambulances has been to bring wounded from those heights to the railway stations in the plain. John Melcher, Jr., says of this work: "The mountain service consists in climbing to the top of a mountain, some 4,000 feet high, where the wounded are brought to us. Two cars are always kept in a little village down the mountain on the other side. This little village is a few kilometers behind the trenches, and is sometimes bombarded by the Germans. The roads up the mountain are very steep, particularly on the Alsatian side. They are rough and so narrow that in places vehicles cannot pass. These roads are full of ruts, and at some points are corduroy, the wood practically forming steps. On one side there is always a sheer precipice."