The American Corps keeps ambulances at the Aubervilliers station day and night in relays, so that at any moment not less than two cars are there to receive wounded. Today I was assigned as orderly to an ambulance on the afternoon shift which begins at one o'clock and ends at nine. The receiving station for wounded is a huge express shed about three hundred feet long and sixty feet wide. A railway siding enters through a big door and within runs longitudinally along one wall. A large storage platform occupies the rest of the interior, on which are arranged four parallel benches running nearly the whole length of the shed. Each bench is about seven feet wide and has a slight slope for "drainage." When we arrived all the benches were crowded with wounded, who were packed side by side in four long ghastly rows. They were wrapped up in their clothes--the same old clothes in which they had fought. The French are, apparently, not sure that the Germans may not yet take Paris, for as a rule they do not permit wounded to be sent to that city. Only those who are slightly wounded in the hand or arm and able to walk, or, on the other hand, those too desperately wounded to survive being moved farther, are allowed to remain in Paris. All the others, although they have already taken two or three days to arrive from the front, are allowed only twelve hours "repose" before they are sent on to the south of France. This "repose" is taken on the benches described above or in similar situations. If the shed is already full and additional trains of wounded arrive, the late comers are left in their cars. Why anyone should consider a train which is standing still more reposeful than one which is moving I cannot imagine. In Paris the wounded at least get something to eat, usually coarse bread with meat and cheese. They arrive in those silly little freight cars marked "eight horses," each of which carries about eighteen wounded, twelve on stretchers in two tiers in each end and some six more standing or sitting in the aisle, which extends from door to door between the stretchers. On arriving at the Aubervilliers station we were on duty all the afternoon, and as no trains happened to arrive this meant standing in the rain and doing nothing at all. After dark, however, three train loads of wounded, each of some fifty cars, came in at intervals of about an hour. The wounded are so many that one counts them by trains and the trains come so often that one loses count even of them. No one who has not seen them can possibly comprehend the human misery contained in one such unit. The first train arrived at five o'clock and brought five hundred cases. They had been two days on the way and had had nothing at all to eat for the last nineteen hours.