bound I was on the spot just in
time to see her fearlessly approaching the prostrate form of a German
soldier, the upper extremity of whose body was hidden beneath the top of
a tin wash boiler. The child raised the lid, beheld, as we did, a
headless human trunk, and fell into a swoon.

We were well on our road before she came to her senses, and there were
moments when I almost wished she might remain dormant until we had
passed beyond the gruesome plain that stretches between Barcy and
Vareddes--now a historic battlefield.

What a weird and wonderful sight it presented that gloomy September
morning. Behind us Barcy, whose every edifice was decapitated or so
degraded as to look like a gigantic sieve. Around us and on all sides
fields fairly ploughed up by shot and shell, and every fifty yards it
seemed to me rose a freshly covered mound, extending as far as eye could
see. On these new-made graves were piled hundreds of red soldier caps,
and here and there a hastily hewn wooden cross bearing such inscriptions
as these, scrawled in lead pencil on a smooth space whittled by a jack
knife:

_Aux Braves du 248_

When an officer was found and identified, he was buried alone and his
name was carefully written on the cross, but more often we saw graves
marked thus:

-Ici reposent deux offlciers et quarante hommes du 28 ... ieme._

Sometimes the tomb was in the ditch (to save digging) and once we saw
the Parisian _pompiers_ burying some German corpses in the very trench
they had dug and died in.

Overhead tangled electric wires swung dangerously near the road, the
poles shattered or knocked agog, while in the distance the stumps of a
once-majestic row of poplars made the horizon look like a grinning
toothless face.

Time and again we were obliged to leave the road to avoid accident by
passing over unexploded shells, and I shall always recall a gigantic oak
tree which though still standing was cleft in twain by a 77-shell
embedded intact in the yawning trunk; the impact, not the explosion, had
caused the rift.

The farther we advanced the more evident became the signs of recent
conflict. Hay stacks seemed to have been a favorite target as well as
refuge. One we saw was almost completely tunneled through, and the
blood bespattered sides of the opening told that the occupant had been
caught as in a trap. Around these stacks were scattered the remains of
old boots and shoes, scarlet blood-soaked rags, dry beans, bits