the darkness toward us just as we were
trying to discern them. As I stepped down from my somewhat exposed
position a soldier standing a few feet farther along the line raised
_his_ head above the parapet, as though to relieve his cramped
muscles. Just then a star-shell burst above us, turning the trench
into day. _Ping!!!_ There was a ringing metallic sound, as when a
22-caliber bullet strikes the target in a shooting-gallery, and the
big soldier who had incautiously exposed himself crumpled up in the
bottom of the trench with a bullet through his helmet and through his
brain. The young officer in command of the listening-post cursed
softly. "I'm forever warning the men not to expose themselves," he
said irritatedly, "but they forget it the next minute. They're nothing
but stupid children." He spoke in much the same tone of annoyance he
might have used if the man had been a clumsy servant who had broken a
valuable dish. Then he went into the tiny dugout where the telephone
was, and rang up the trench commander, and asked him to send out a
bearer, for the _boyau_ communicating with the listening-post was too
narrow to admit the passage of a stretcher. The bearer arrived just as
we started to return. He was a regular dray-horse of a man, with
shoulders as massive and competent as those of a Constantinople
_hamel_. Strapped to his back by a sort of harness was a contrivance
which looked like a rude armchair with the legs cut off. His comrades
hoisted the dead man onto the back of the live man, and with a rope
took a few turns about the bodies of both. As we made our slow way
back to the fire-trench, and so to the rear, there stumbled at our
heels the grunting porter with his ghastly burden. Now and then I
would glance over my shoulder and, in the fleeting glare of the
star-shells, would glimpse, above the porter's straining shoulders,
the head of the dead soldier lolling inertly from side to side, as
though very, very tired.... And I wondered if in some lonely cabin by
the Volga a woman was praying for her boy.

FOOTNOTES:

[B] Since this was written the Germans have bombarded Rheims so
heavily, with the evident intention of completing its destruction,
that the French military authorities have ordered the evacuation of
the civil population.

VI

"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!"

General Gouraud, the one-armed hero of Gallipoli, who commands the
forces in Champagne, is the most picturesque and gallant figure in all
t