This surgeon told us he had an American wife, and he asked me to bear a message for him to his wife's people in the States. So if these lines should come to the notice of Mrs. Rosamond Harris, who lives at Hinesburg, Vermont, she may know that her son-in-law, Doctor Schilling, was at last accounts very busy and very well, although coated with white dustface, head and eyebrows--so that he remimded me of a clown in a pantomime, and dyed as to his hands with iodine to an extent that made his fingers look like pieces of well-cured meerschaum. They were bringing in more men, newly wounded that day, as we came out of Doctor Schilling's improvised operating room in the little village schoolhouse, and one of the litter bearers was a smart-faced little London Cockney, a captured English ambulance-hand, who wore a German soldier's cap to save him from possible annoyance as he went about his work. Not very many wounded had arrived since the morning--it was a dull day for them, the surgeons said--but I took note that, when the Red Cross men put down a canvas stretcher upon the courtyard flags and shortly thereafter took it up again, it left a broad red smear where it rested against the flat stones. Also this stretcher and all the other stretchers had been so sagged by the weight of bodies that they threatened to rip from the frames, and so stained by that which had stained them that the canvas was as stiff as though it had been varnished and revarnished with many coats of brown shellac. But it wasn't shellac. There is just one fluid which leaves that brown, hard coating when it dries upon woven cloth. As I recall now we had come through the gate of the schoolhouse to where the automobiles stood when a puff of wind, blowing to us from the left, which meant from across the battlefront, brought to our noses a certain smell which we already knew full well. "You get it, I see," said the German officer who stood alongside me. "It comes from three miles off, but you can get it five miles distant when the wind is strong. That"--and he waved his left arm toward it as though the stench had been a visible thing--"that explains why tobacco is so scarce with us among the staff back yonder in Laon. All the tobacco which can be spared is sent to the men in the front trenches. As long as they smoke and keep on smoking they can stand--that! "You see," he went on painstakingly, "the situation out there at Cerny is like this: The French and English, but mainly the English, held the ground first. We drove them back and they lost very heavily. In places their trenches were actually full of dead and dying men when we took those trenches. "You could have buried them merely by filling up the trenches with earth. And that old beet-sugar factory which you saw this noon when we were at field headquarters--it was crowded with badly wounded Englishmen.