will kindly allow me."

The enemy did not often allow the young gentleman to sleep, and
about the windmill the shells were bursting.

They reached one Sunday morning almost as far as the little twelfth-
century church to which the young officer had stepped down from his
windmill to hear Mass in the middle of a crowd of soldiers chanting
the office, recited by a soldier, accompanied by a harmonium played
by another soldier. The windows were shattered, and a beautiful old
house next to the church lay in ruins.

The officer spent lonely hours in the windmill in charge of the
telephone exchange, from which the batteries were worked. The men
in the trenches and the gun-pits pitied his loneliness, and invented a
scheme to cheer him up. So after dark, when the cannonade
slackened, he put the receiver to his ears and listened to a Tyrolese
ballad sung by an orderly, and to the admirable imitation of a barking
dog performed by a sapper, and to a Parisian chanson delightfully
rendered by the aviator.

"Bonne nuit, maman," wrote the officer of artillery at the end of each
letter from his windmill.

8

The front did not change its outline on the map, except by
hairbreadths, for months at a stretch, yet at many points of the line
there were desperate battles, a bayonet charge now and then, and
hours of frightful slaughter, when men saw red and killed with joy.

There was a little farm near Steinbach round which a battle raged for
many days. Leading to it was a sunken road, defended by the enemy,
until one day they put up a number of non-combatants from captured
villages to prevent a French attack.

"Among them we could distinguish a woman, with her hair falling to
her shoulders and her hands tied behind her back. This new infamy
inflamed the courage of our soldiers. A company rushed forward with
fixed bayonets. The road to the farm was swept by the enemy's fire,
but nothing stopped our men. In spite of our losses we carried the
position and are masters of the farm. There was no mercy in those
moments of triumph. The ghastly business of war was done to the
uttermost."

There were ghastly things in some of the enemy's trenches. One of
the worst of them was seen in the forest of Apremont, in the district of
Woevre, where the enemy was strongly entrenched in some quarries
quite close to the French trenches which sapped their way forward to
those pits. When the guns ceased firing the French soldiers often
heard the soun