On the last day we held our burial service. We gathered together at the cemetery with a large flag spread out in the middle of the plot. I read a brief Jewish service, followed by Chaplains Bagby and Stewart in the Protestant and Father Kelley in the Catholic burial service, and at the end the bugle sounded "taps" for all those men of different faiths lying there together. We could see and hear the shells bursting beyond the hill, probably a hostile scout had caught sight of us at work. Above floated a British aeroplane. Some English soldiers working on their burial plot nearby stopped their digging and listened to our service. And so we said farewell to our lost comrades and to the war at the same time. CHAPTER IV AFTER THE ARMISTICE AFTER the burial work at St. Souplet was over, great covered lorries took us back the sixty miles or more to Corbie, in the vicinity of Amiens, which was to be our rest area. We greeted its paved streets, its fairly intact houses, its few tiny shops, as the height of luxury. Here and there a roof was destroyed or a wall down, for the enemy had come within three miles of Corbie in their drives earlier in the year. But we were in rest and comparative plenty at last. We saw real civilians again, not merely the few old people and little children left behind in the towns we had liberated. We had regular meals again and a chance to purchase a few luxuries beside, such as French bread at a shop and hard candy at the "Y." We no longer heard the whine of the shell or whistle of the bullet, nor smelled gas, nor slept in cellars. I was even lucky enough to capture a thick spring mattress which, with my blankets, made a bed that even a certain staff colonel envied me. A home-made grate in the fire-place fitted it for a tiny coal fire; the window frames were re-covered with oiled paper; we read the London Daily Mail in its Paris edition only one day late, instead of seeing it every ten days and then often two weeks out of date. My billet, which I obtained from the British town major, was a tall, narrow house just off the principal square, very pleasant indeed in dry weather. Its chief defect was a huge shell-hole in the roof through which the water poured in torrents when it rained, so that we had to cover ourselves with our rubber shelter-halves when we slept at night. The shell-hole, however, was a constant source of fuel, and we burned the laths and wood-work, of which small pieces were lying all about the top floor, until we found means to obtain a small but steady supply of coal. The house afforded room, after I had preempted it, for the Senior Chaplain of the Division, the Division Burial Officer and myself, together with our three orderlies.