Recy is the deadest little town in the Department of the Marne. They are therefore punishing the two-twenty-first, and consequently us at the same time, by billeting us here for the repos. I am afraid that we are going to have a mighty dull month, loafing around the cantonment and taking a malade run once a week.
Sometimes there is a little more than this, however. We were all moping around the cantonment yesterday, when Decupert, the lieutenant's clerk, came in and said orders had just come from Bouy, a place ten miles north of here, to send out fifteen ambulances at once; the Boches were shelling the town, and we had to evacuate the hospital. There was a mad stampede to the cars, and in five minutes fifteen little Fords were racing wildly over the hills towards Bouy. The bombardment was over when we arrived. The Boches appeared to have been testing a new long-range gun, and dropped about forty of the big shells into the town from a battery fourteen miles away; but no great damage was done. One shell which dropped in the courtyard of the hospital, made a crater twenty feet across, but never
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