alute, and held the posture
rigidly until the second dead man in his yellow box had joined the
company of the first dead man in his.

Just before this happened, though, one of the nurses of the nunnery
hospital did a thing which I shall never forget. She must have seen
that the first coffin had flowers upon it, and in the same instant
realized that the coffin in whose occupant she had a more direct
interest was bare. So she left the straggling line and came running
back. The wall streamed with woodbine, very glorious in its autumnal
flamings. She snatched a trailer of the red and yellow leaves down from
where it clung, and as she hurried back her hands worked with magic
haste, making it into a wreath. She reached the second squad of bearers
and put her wreath upon the lid of the box, and then sought her place
with the other nurses. The guns went up with a snap upon the shoulders
of the company. The soldiers' feet thudded down all together upon the
stones, and with the priest reciting his office the procession passed
out of sight, going toward the burial ground at the back of the town.
Presently, when the shadows were thickening into gloom and the angelus
bells were ringing in the church, I heard, a long way off, the rattle of
the rifles as the soldiers fired goodnight volleys over the graves of
their dead comrades.

On the next day, at Hirson, which was another of our stopping points on
the journey to the front, we saw the joint funeral of seven men leaving
the hospital where they had died during the preceding twelve hours, and
I shan't forget that picture either. There was a vista bounded by a
stretch of one of those unutterably bleak backways of a small and shabby
French town. The rutted street twisted along between small gray plaster
houses, with ugly, unnecessary gable-ends, which faced the road at wrong
angles. Small groups of towns-people stood against the walls to watch.

There was also a handful of idling soldiers who watched from the gateway
of the house where they were billeted.

Seven times the bearers entered the hospital door, and each time as they
reappeared, bringing one of the narrow, gaudy, yellow boxes, the
officers lined up at the door would salute and the soldiers in double
lines at the opposite side of the road would present arms, and then, as
the box was lifted upon the wagon waiting to receive it, would smash
their guns down on the bouldered road with a crash. When the job of
brin