The _sous-chef_ calls us around him and gives us our detailed instructions, for he is going back by the first car. Suddenly, as we are listening to him attentively, there is a piercing _zz-chung_, and a 250 lands within a hundred yards with a dull crash and a geyser of trees, dirt, and black smoke. We look at him inquiringly and he points to the _abri_. We nod and adjourn to it. A few more shells follow, then all is peaceful again, while the French batteries around us hammer away at the Germans in their turn. We take lunch on a rustic table under the trees and thoroughly enjoy having our tin plates rattled by the concussion of the guns, while a Frenchman explains to us the difference in sound between an _arrivée_ and a _départ_. Such is the initiation. Then while we, as yet mere amateurs, eat peacefully, relishing the novelty of the situation, and buoyed up by our first excitement, a short procession passes. It is a group of men carrying stretchers on which are what were men a few minutes before, who, standing within talking distance of us, were blown out of existence by the shells which whistled over our heads and, bursting, scattered _éclats_ and dirt on the steel roof that sheltered us. It is a side of the front which has not touched us deeply before, a side which in the first few days of the ordeal by fire impresses itself more and more on the novice, until he learns to temper the realization with philosophy and the so-called humor of the front. Then is the veteran in embryo. The ambulance sections are divided into two classes—gear-shift and Ford. The gear-shift sections are composed of Fiats, Berliets, or some other French car. They carry five _couchés_ or eight _assis_, and have two men to a car. The French Army ambulances are all gear-shift, and the gear-shift sections included in the American Field Service all originally belonged to the French Government. Before the American Government took over the Ambulance Corps, the American Field Service, in addition to sending out Ford sections as quickly as they were subscribed in America, had been gradually absorbing the French Ambulance System, relieving with its own men the French drivers who could then serve in the trenches, and including those sections among its own.