eyes.

"The German trench-mortars are very evil," said the captain.

We poked about the ruins, raising our heads cautiously above sand-bags
to look at the German lines cut into the lower slopes of Vimy, and
thrust out by communication trenches to the edge of the village in which
we walked. A boy officer came up out of a hole and saluted the captain,
who stepped back and said, in an emotional way:

"Tiens! C'est toi, Edouard?"

"Oui, mon Capitaine."

The boy had a fine, delicate, Latin face, with dark eyes and long, black
eyelashes.

"You are a lieutenant, then? How does it go, Edouard?"

"It does not go," answered the boy like that French sergeant in Ablain
St.-Nazaire. "This is a bad place. I lose my men every day. There were
three killed yesterday, and six wounded. To-day already there are two
killed and ten wounded."

Something broke in his voice.

"Ce n'est pas bon du tout, du tout!" ("It is not good at all, at all!")

The captain clapped him on the shoulders, tried to cheer him.

"Courage, mon vieux!"

The rain shot down on us. Our feet slithered in deep, greasy mud. Sharp
stabs of flame vomited out of the slopes of Vimy. There was the
high, long-drawn scream of shells in flight to Notre Dame de Lorette.
Batteries of soixante-quinzes were firing rapidly, and their shells cut
through the air above us like scythes. The caldron in this pit of war
was being stirred up. Another wounded poilu was carried past us, covered
by a bloody blanket like the other one. From slimy sand-bags and wet
ruins came the sickening stench of human corruption. A boot with some
pulp inside protruded from a mud--bank where I stood, and there was a
human head, without eyes or nose, black, and rotting in the puddle of
a shell--hole. Those were relics of a battle on May 9th, a year before,
when swarms of boys, of the '16 class, boys of eighteen, the flower of
French youth, rushed forward from the crossroads at La Targette, a few
hundred yards away, to capture these ruins of Neuville St.-Vaast. They
captured them, and it cost them seven thousand in killed and wounded--at
least three thousand dead. They fought like young demons through the
flaming streets. They fell in heaps under the German barrage-fire.
Machine--guns cut them down as though they were ripe corn under the
sickle. But these French boys broke the Prussian Guard that day.

Round about, over all this ground below Notre Dame de Lorette and the
fields round Souchez, the