; but now the sight is at once a
sensation and a novelty to us. These are all French prisoners; there
are no Belgians or Englishmen among them. In their long, cumbersome
blue coats and baggy red pants they are huddled down against a wall in a
heap of straw. They lie there silently, chewing straws and looking very
forlorn. Four German soldiers with fixed bayonets are guarding them.

The young lieutenant leads us along a steeply ascending road over a
ridge and then stops; and as we look about us the consciousness strikes
home to us, with almost the jar of a physical blow, that we are standing
where men have lately striven together and have fallen and died.

In front of us and below us is the town, with the river winding into it
at the east and out of it at the west; and beyond the town, to the
north, is the cup-shaped valley of fair, fat farm lands, all heavy and
pregnant with un-garnered, ungathered crops. Behind us, on the front of
the hill, is a hedge, and beyond the hedge--just a foot or so back of
it, in fact--is a deep trench, plainly dug out by hand, and so lately
done that the cut clods are still moist and fresh-looking. At the first
instant of looking it seems to us that this intrenchment is full of dead
men; but when we look closer we see that what we take for corpses are
the scattered garments and equipments of French infantrymen--long blue
coats; peaked, red-topped caps; spare shirts; rifled knapsacks; water-
bottles; broken guns; side arms; bayonet belts and blanket rolls. There
are perhaps twenty guns in sight. Each one has been rendered useless by
being struck against the earth with sufficient force to snap the stock
at the grip.

Almost at my feet is a knapsack, ripped open and revealing a card of
small china buttons, a new red handkerchief, a gray-striped flannel
shirt, a pencil and a sheaf of writing paper. Rummaging in the main
compartment I find, folded at the back, a book recording the name and
record of military service of one Gaston Michel Miseroux, whose home is
at Amiens, and who is--or was--a private in the Tenth Battalion of the
---- Regiment of Chasseurs a Pied. Whether this Gaston Michel Miseroux
got away alive without his knapsack, or whether he was captured or was
killed, there is none to say. His service record is here in the
trampled dust and he is gone.

Before going farther the young lieutenant, speaking in his broken
English, told us the story of the fight, which had been