The two men were seated opposite each other. The first man nervously motioned to the waiter and the newcomer gave his order. It was plain that they were both excited, but the table adjoining was unoccupied, so they attracted no attention. The noisy waiter, banging bottles on the table, drowned out the next few sentences. Then I heard the second man: "So I got out first, but you managed to get here yesterday--a day in advance." The other replied: "I was lucky enough to get a horse. They were shelling the market place when I left." The second man gulped his drink and plucked nervously at the other's sleeve. "My wife is at the hotel," he almost mumbled the words, "I must tell her--you said the market place. But how about the Rue Jeanne d'Arc?--her sister lived there. She remained." "How about the Rue Jeanne d'Arc?" the other repeated. He clucked his tongue sympathetically. "That was all destroyed in the morning." The second man drew a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the sweat from his forehead. VI--STORIES OF THE REFUGEES FROM THE SOMME They were climbing out of the cattle cars into the mud of the freight yards. They numbered about fifty,--the old, the halt, the blind and the children. We were whizzing past on a motor ambulance with two desperately wounded men inside, headed for a hospital a half mile away. The Medical Major said that unless we hurried the men would probably be dead when we arrived. So we could not lessen speed as those from Quesnoy-sur-Somme descended painfully from the cattle cars. Instead, we sounded the siren for them to get out of the way. The mud from our wheels splattered them. But it was not mud--not regular mud. It was black, unhealthy ooze, generated after a month of rain in the aged layers of train soot. It was full of fever germs. Typhoid was on the rampage. As we passed the sentinels at the gates of the yards we were forced to halt in a jam of ammunition and food wagons. To the army that survives is given the first thought. The wounded in the ambulance could wait. We took right of way only over civilians--including refugees. We asked a sentinel concerning those descending from the cattle cars, "_là bas_." He said they came from a place called Quesnoy-sur-Somme. It was not a city he told us, nor a town--not even a village. Just a straggling hamlet along the river bank--a place called Quesnoy-sur-Somme. The past tense was the correct usage of the verb. The place _was_ that; but now--now it is just a black path of desolation beside a lifeless river. The artillery had thundered across the banks for a month. The fish floated backs down on the water. When the ammunition and food wagons gave us room enough, we again raced through the streets and delivered our wounded at the hospital--alive. Then we returned to the freight yards for more. Several ambulance columns had worked through the night from the field hospitals to the freight yards. There the men were sorted and the less desperate cases entrained.