before taken up a
position. A battalion of the 17th French Line Regiment had charged
across the flat field into their teeth. We were told that in this
charge they had lost fifty per cent. of their men but had gone on
undaunted, and had "got home" _a la bayonette_, capturing the position
and a number of prisoners.

We walked silently among the dead. Where the casualties had been
heaviest, we counted seventeen bodies within a circle thirty paces in
diameter. Every man of the group had fallen forward with his bayonet
pointing straight out in front of him. Some had been running with such
_elan_ that in falling their shoulders had fairly plowed into the soft
ground. They had nearly all been killed by shrapnel fire, which in
most cases had killed cleanly. We found one, however, who had been
badly mashed by a shell which had burst in the ground at his feet,
making a deep, oblong hole six feet long into which his shattered body
had fallen. The metal identification tags, one of which every soldier
wears, had not been collected. These are removed by the burying squad,
and sent home as announcers of the decease. This group had all been
so recently killed that their faces were very lifelike. One found
oneself repeating "How natural they look!" and one could pretty well
judge what sort of men they had been in life. Here was a slight
smooth-faced blond-haired boy, who must have been dearly beloved by
the women of his family. Here again a serious, kindly, middle-aged man
whose face bore a curious expression of preoccupation. I caught myself
thinking, "I should like to have known him." We found one who in his
dying agony had evidently taken from his pocket a letter which now lay
a sodden mass in his dead hand. We could not resist that mute appeal,
but picked the letter carefully from his stiff fingers to be dried out
later and delivered, if possible, to the woman to whom it was
addressed.

As one looked at all these useless, cumbersome bits of carrion which
no one in the rush of war had had time to remove, one could not but
remember how each one had been suddenly wrenched from a useful life
and in death had somewhere left a broken family. The dead do not have
the tragic expressions with which painters credit them. Those who
have been instantly killed generally wear grotesque expressions. Some
look bored--others have a silly look of surprise, as if a practical
joke had just been played upon them. These grotesque expressions are
much