This is one of our advance field hospitals, improvised, as best might be, the day after one the most damnable abominations committed by the Germans. The nature of their affliction made it impossible to transfer all these sons of France, from whom seems to come the noise of the death-rattle without hope of recovery, to a place farther away. This large hall with dilapidated walls was yesterday a wine cellar for storing barrels of champagne; these cots--about fifty in number--were made in feverish haste of branches which still retain their bark, and they resemble the kind of furniture in our gardens that we call rustic. But why is there this heat, in which it is almost impossible to draw a natural breath, pouring out from those stoves? The reason for it is that it is never hot enough for the lungs of persons who have been asphyxiated. And this darkness: wherefore this darkness, which gives a Dantesque aspect to this place of torment, and which must be such a hindrance to the gentle, white-gowned nurses? It is because the barbarians are there in their burrows, quite near this village, with the shattering of whose houses and church spire they have more than once amused themselves; and if, at the gloomy fall of a November night, through their ever watchful field-glasses, they saw a range of lighted windows indicating a long hall, they would at once guess that there was a field hospital, and shells would be showered down upon the humble cots. It is well known, this preference of theirs for shelling hospitals, Red Cross convoys, churches.