tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">174

XXXII   Ruin and Death 178 XXXIII   In the Palace of the King 187 XXXIV   The Kaiser's Envy 190 XXXV   Caught by the Huns and Tried as a Spy 196 XXXVI   Threatened with Crucifixion 204 XXXVII   My Escape and Return to Good Old France 210 XXXVIII   No Man's Land 215 XXXIX   Jean and "Frenchie" 223 XL   The Psychology of France 228 XLI   The Contagious Spirit of Sacrifice 233 XLI   The Heritage of Hate 238 XLII   "Back From Hell" 243

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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Samuel Cranston Benson	Frontispiece
American Ambulance Headquarters, Neuilly, France	22
Ambulance Ready to Leave for the Front	22
An American Woman Caring for a Little Wounded French Child	38
An American Ambulance Ready for Duty	60
American Ambulances on the Road to the Front	80
Allied Troops Charging Through Barbed-Wire Entanglements	102
A Dressing Station Set Up on Newly Captured Ground	120
A Hurry Call	134
"Jumbo," the Biggest Ambulance on the Western Front	134
The Burning of a French Field Hospital	170
Ambulance Men Working Over a "Gassed" Soldier	225
Destruction of a French Hospital by a German Bomb	238
American Hospital at Neuilly Transferred to General Pershing	246

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"Back From Hell"

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CHAPTER I A FORMER PACIFIST

When the old Chicago cut loose from her moorings in an Atlantic port it was a red letter day for me. She was a good sized craft, of the French Line, and was to carry a lot of other Americans, besides myself, from the United States to France. We were all in a spirit of expectancy, mingled perhaps with sadness, for we were going over to see and have a hand in the most stupendous event of history, the Great War. Although many different motives actuated us, our destination was the same, and all of us would soon be within striking distance of the scene of action. Some of those on board were going primarily from a sense of duty and gratitude to the great European Republic, whose men had come over here in '76 to help America kick off the chains which George III had welded on her ankles, and secondarily, because they wanted to kill a few of the Germans whom they right well hated.

Others were going, and made no bones about saying so, because they were natural born soldiers of fortune and were inclined to go anywhere that action and excitement were likely to be found. A few were to be mere onlookers who were crossing the sea as students of a great world movement, who, from an economic or social point of view, would tabulate in a cold and matter-of-course way, the facts which they observed and the conclusions to which they came.

I belonged to