remained of our gun crew went that night to the wagon lines,
spending a few days there while waiting for our gun to be replaced.

When our gun was replaced I started back from the wagon lines, carrying
a piston rod of the buffer, with Downey assisting me. We were on
horseback and getting into Labazell Valley, when a shell passed over our
head so close that we felt the wind of it; it was accompanied by a great
flare over to our right. The shell struck one of our ammunition dumps
containing about 50,000 rounds of shells and other explosives, such as
rifle grenades, Mills bombs, French mortar bombs, aerial torpedoes, high
explosive shells, shrapnel shells, star and gas shells. The disaster
resulting from this one single shell was almost inconceivable. It
started a fire that gathered strength each second, for all the world
like a prairie fire, and the scenic effect was that of a titanic
fireworks exhibition. The moon was brightly shining in a clear sky, but
the star shells shooting in the air and exploding with a constantly
increasing rapidity, the blaze of artificial light quickly obtained
ascendency over the mistress of the night; and the shrapnel shells,
throwing their contents of danger in all directions, together with the
hissing and roaring of all the other exploding missiles of death, formed
a diapason of sound that makes one of those wonder-moments that come so
seldom in a lifetime.

The reflection of the fire from the explosion was quickly observed by
Fritz, and in short order he had his airplanes hovering overhead, and
they too were dropping their bombs wherever human activities were noted.
We hastily dismounted, tying our horses to the barbed-wire iron pickets
in the side of the road, and rushed with a body of men, mostly wagon
drivers whose wagons were stalled on the road in the congestion, over to
do what we could to save the ammunition which is so badly needed at all
times.

In the first rush toward the pile an explosion snuffed out the lives of
thirty or forty of the men, knocking the rest of us off our feet like so
many nine-pins, besides killing several of the horses on the road, and
to add to the already indescribable chaos, several of the horses
stampeded, racing blindly into barbed-wire entanglements and adding to
the general destruction.

What with Fritz dropping bombs from his airplanes, our horses stampeding
and screaming like wild things, and our own explosives bursting in every
conceivable direc