It is only a few minutes’ run to Brocourt, where the _triage_, or front hospital, is located. This is like a giant hangar in shape, but, instead of the mottled green, blue, and grey _camouflage_ of the latter, it is brilliantly white with a red cross fifty feet square surmounting it. Despite this fact, it is bombed and shelled regularly by the “merciful” Hun. We pass through the shattered town, its church tower still standing, by a miracle, and pointing its scarred and violated finger to the heavens with the silent appeal—“Avenge!” The _sous-chef_, who is sitting beside me, tells me to put on my helmet and to sling my mask over my shoulder. From here on men “go west” suddenly, and in their boots. We pass over a short rise in sight of the German _saucisses_, and down a steep and long hill into Récicourt. Of that hill there is much to remember—but today it is just steep, and green, and has many trees by the roadside loaded down with much unripe fruit. Past the sentry, over the bridge which the Boche hit yesterday with an eight-inch shell—which failed to explode and bounced into the muddy river—and we are at the relay station. It is a barn with half the roof and a goodly portion of the walls missing. We use this to screen the cars from the eyes of raiding enemy aeroplanes, of which there are many. Two of us are at once assigned to run to the _poste de secours_, P 2, where just now we are to keep two cars, the other four remaining at the relay station. Again luck is with me, and I am in the first car to roll. Our run is entirely through the woods, in the Hesse Forest, and as the enemy will not be able to see us we rejoice—but we soon learn not to rejoice prematurely. There is hardly a man in sight as we struggle along through the mud, but beside the road everywhere, often spilling into it, lie piles of shells, 75’s, 155’s, and _torpilles_ by the thousand, apparently arranged haphazardly. The _torpille_ is a winged and particularly deadly shell, first cousin to the German _minniewerfer_, and differing essentially only in range. The _maréchal des logis_ informs us encouragingly that the one lying in the middle of the road which we just ran over was a Boche which did not explode when it landed, and has not—yet. Everything is wrapped in the silence of the grave except for an occasional crash as some battery sends its message into Germany. We arrive at P 2, which is distinguished from the rest of the world by a foot square of white cotton and the universal red cross. There is room inside the gate—a log dyke against the mud—to park the cars: “Room sideways or deep,” as one member of the section described it as he watched his boots sink steadily into the mud.