pon that field of death,
the battlefield at the close of day. And there can be no fitter shroud
for him who has fallen on that field than his soldier's cloak. A
little earth that will be grass-grown and flower-spangled again in the
spring, a simple cross of rough wood, a name, a regimental number, a
date--all this is better than the most splendid obsequies. And what
can be more touching than the poor little bunches of wild flowers
which the friends of the dead gather on the banks of ditches, and
which are to be seen days afterwards, faded and yet so fair, hanging
on the humble crosses? Such was to be the portion of Lagaraldi and
Durand. Why should we pity them? We will weep for them, we will not
pity them.

They were there, lying side by side in their cloaks, the turned-up
capes of which shrouded their heads, and we bared our own in silence.
Each of us, consciously or unconsciously, breathed a prayer, each set
his teeth and tried to restrain his tears.

But we were not destined to pray in peace to the end. At the moment
when the Lieutenant-Colonel was about to express our sorrow and
pronounce the last farewell the enemy's mortars, suddenly changing
their objective, began to bombard the part of the wood on the edge of
which we were standing.

What was their idea? Did they think our reserves were massed in the
wood? However this may have been, a formidable avalanche descended
above and around us. The first salvo literally cleared the wood close
by us. A great tree, cut through the middle, bent over for an instant
and then rolled gently to the ground with a great crackling of broken
boughs. At the same time the German bullets began to whistle round us
by thousands, apparently determined to draw us into their frenzied
saraband. Death seemed for a moment inevitable. We could not hesitate;
we had to take cover, or to be mown down by shot or shell.

Then--I shall remember the gruesome moment to my dying hour--we all
leaped into the only available shelter--crouching together in the
newly-dug graves. We were just in time.

Bullets flew past us; the great "coal-boxes" burst without
intermission. The uproar was tremendous, beyond anything we had ever
heard. It would be impossible to describe the horror of those minutes.
Those graves, all too spacious for the poor bodies we were about to
commit to them, were too small to shelter us. We pressed one against
the other in the strangest positions, hiding our heads between the
sho