Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/117

 April 5, 1917. It is eight-thirty, an hour past the regular time for the relief man to show up, and still no one has come. We no longer change shifts at four in the afternoon, as we used to when we first went to Esnes. The Boches have been deliberately firing on our ambulances lately, and we now change runs in the dark, in order to avoid any unnecessary driving in daylight. Most of us would really rather take the run in daytime, for with all due respect to German shells, it is no fun going over the old road in the dark.

I brought my own blanket roll, hoping to have a quiet sleep, but they brought in "frozen feet" all night long and I had to carry them back to Ville. I made seven runs altogether and carried thirty blessés. If I remember rightly, only four of them were couchés. All the remainder had that awful disease "Pied gélé," where the foot slowly rots away, and leaves the bone bare.

I sat in a shell hole outside of the abri for a while this afternoon, watching the Boches pepper one of our "150" batteries about two hundred yards behind me. They shelled it for over an hour, and I had a