Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/111

 During the forenoon I waited around outside the abri and since no blessés seemed to be forthcoming, I strolled over to an observation tree several hundred yards distant. It was a big beech, more than sixty feet high, and appeared to have a small screened platform in the topmost branches. When I had climbed up about thirty steps I came to a place where a shell had torn away half of the trunk; but it seemed solid enough so I took a chance and went on to the top. From here I could see for miles over the front, beginning with Mort Homme on the right, then across Hill 304, Avocourt, and the surrounding forest and ending with the plateau above Vauquois. It was wonderfully interesting to me to watch the crude, zig-zag lines twisting in and out among the hills and valleys. I was only sorry that I hadn't a pair of field glasses along. They would have made it easier to see the trenches and some of the "150's" bursting in the valley beyond me would also have shown up more clearly.

McLane who had been spending the night at Post Three, got a bogus telephone message to come up here for a wounded officer and dropped in about noon. Not a blessé had arrived for hours so we talked for a while and finally started to dig for fusées and compression bands in the fresh shell holes behind the post. There was one only a few hours old in which we were particularly interested. We