ent the Germans suddenly fired a scattering rifle volley.
Attacked in front and on the flank, every Frenchman but one was hit,
and sixty dead still lay in a row across the field as if cut down by a
mowing machine. The sole survivor of the fatal cross-fire was a boy
with a tiny black moustache. Undaunted, he had charged alone in among
the Germans and had received many bayonets in his heroic body. He lay
on his back among the German cartridges fifty yards ahead of the row
of his dead comrades.

Behind the crest of the plateau we could see the emplacements of four
guns at intervals of about forty yards, but they had not been used in
this engagement and may have been shelling some more distant
objective.

Before leaving this field we gathered a quantity of potatoes and put
them in the German shell baskets which we had picked up earlier in the
day, in order that our gift to the field hospital might not leave us
totally without food. We felt rather unhappy at not being able to pay
for them, but "a la guerre comme a la guerre."

* * * * *

Just outside of Fere Champenoise on the road running west toward
Broussy-le-Grand, we came upon the scene of an action in which the
casualties had been exceedingly heavy. The neighborhood was absolutely
deserted and as the wounded had been removed and there were no
peasants about we could find no one to elucidate for us what had taken
place. The action was not easy to unravel and the following
conclusions were unverified by any eyewitnesses.

We, however, judged by the condition of the dead and other
circumstantial evidence that the fight had taken place at the very
beginning of the great battle--that is, on the morning of Tuesday, the
8th, when the French were slowly pushed back from the vicinity of Fere
Champenoise. The road ran through the middle of an open field, with
heavy forests on either side, some three hundred yards away to the
north and south. A French regiment had evidently taken up a defensive
position to the left of the road and parallel with it, thus facing
the woods to the north and some four hundred yards away. These woods
were held by a regiment of Imperial Guard and a battery of artillery
had been placed some three hundred yards behind them. The Guards had
advanced one hundred and fifty yards into the open and then formed a
firing-line. In some inexplicable manner they had accomplished this
manoeuvre without casualties.

The two firin