I narrated my experiences in the Ambulance Corps in words that have been so often given in print that it is not worth while to repeat them. What has not so frequently been recorded, because not every one has felt it to the same degree, is the racking of spirit, soul, and body by the unrelieved horror of the days and nights. I suppose I must own to being in regard to all this more delicately constituted than the majority of men. There were others like me, but they were relatively not numerous. Of them, too, we hear little, partly because not all of those who survived like to confess the weakness, and few survived. If it were possible to get at the facts I think it would be found that among those who sickened and died a large proportion were predisposed by sheer inability to go on living any longer in this world of men. I could give you the names of not a few in whom the soul was stricken before the body was. They were for the most part sensitively organized fellows, lovers of the beautiful, and they simply couldn’t live. Officially their deaths are ascribed to pneumonia or to something else; but the real cause, while right on the surface, was beyond the doctor’s diagnosis. I didn’t sicken; and I didn’t die; I wasn’t even wounded. What happened was that at Bourg-la-Comtesse a shell came down in the midst of a bunch of us who were stretching our limbs and washing up after a night in a stifling dugout ... and some time during the following twenty-four hours I recovered consciousness, lying on my belly in the darkness, with my face buried in the damp grass of a meadow, like a dead man. I lay for ten or fifteen minutes trying to reconstruct the happenings that had put me there, and to convince myself that I was unhurt. Except for a beast munching not far away, no living thing seemed to be near me. On the left the ruined walls of Bourg-la-Comtesse were barely visible through the starlight, while to my right a jagged row of tree-tops fringed the sky-line. In the velvety blackness in front of me the stars were dimmed by shells hanging over No Man’s Land, Verey lights, darting upward, and radiant bursts of shrapnel. I remembered that our section had halted at an _abri_ a little to the west of the village, and dragging myself from the ground forced my chilled limbs to carry me toward the spot where some of my comrades might be left alive.