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Night Raids from the Air: French

It was two o'clock before I got to bed at the mess. The English officer was still occupying my apartment. I might pass off my action in resigning it to him as philanthropy, but candor compels me to admit that I was glad of an excuse to stay at the house where there was company in case of a bombing raid. The French bills come in.

Friday was a long, tense day. The French merchants and all the people with whom we had dealings, anticipating our withdrawal, swarmed in with accounts. When the G. A. N. (Grand Armee Nationale)) sent in its request for a check (previously, I had been obliged fairly to windlass their bill out of them), I knew the French would evacuate. The Commandant sent for the Directrice, and advised her to follow French headquarters wherever it might move. He said he was evacuating all French hospitals and had turned over all evacuation hospitals to the English. No more wounded French were to be brought into E--. The German aviators bomb hospitals again.

All day I worked without food, and after 7.30 got supper for myself and three companions. We hoped for a night's rest, but the Germans began bombing us at dusk, and kept it up till daylight. They were after hospitals, as we knew by the fact that the dropping bombs were at a distance from us and the regular line. All night the machine-gun battle went on--our own guns at E--, warring with the sweeping planes overhead. We got so tired of going to shelter, and so accustomed to the firing, that we finally stayed in our rooms and even opened our shutters to peer out into the calm summer sky. Shells were bursting and ground signals of colored lights were streaming skyward. It was too exciting to sleep until we gave out from sheer exhaustion. I managed to get an intermittent slumber from four until seven.

The town is full of refugees.