Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/34

 Such places are twenty-five or thirty miles behind the front and are very similar to our base hospitals. From here patients are sent by train into Paris for major operations or to the south of France to recuperate.

Mr. Fisher took five of us out in the Ford truck Tuesday morning and gave us a short driving-lesson in anticipation of the final test for the French driver's license which we must have before we go to the front. It was comparatively simple for most of us; but some real excitement started when Payne, one of the Espagne men, started driving. He is sort of a queer duck, anyway. The first night he was in Paris he crawled over the picket fence around the Eiffel Tower and was almost shot by a sentry. He did nobly on Tuesday, however. He had barely taken the wheel before we saw that he had never driven much before. He jammed on the accelerator just as we were rounding a corner, headed for a tree, and unfortunately missed it by a few inches, or we would have stopped here. Then he speeded up considerably, and skidded for thirty feet along a trolley-track embankment, scraped the side of an old dray horse and then ducked under its nose just for spite. We finally ended up two miles further on, with Mr. Fisher hanging firmly to the wheel and doing his best to get Payne's feet off the pedals so that he could use his own and stop the machine. . ..