"I'll be careful," I replied, and he smiled in a way that showed he understood. I then went down the line of the trench for perhaps fifty meters, stopping here and there to go into the firing pits, where by now most of the rifles were silent, one man in each pit watching through the oblong hole between the sand bags, lest the enemy creep up, for their cannonading had ceased and shells no longer fell upon that narrow zone between the trenches. They appeared to take turns watching, the two men in each pit, the one on relief sitting on the ground, his back against the dirt wall, as though fatigued. It was in one of these pits that I stuck up my head--for the enemy's bullets no longer whizzed by--and looked out upon the little battle field. The rain had ceased; the stars were coming out. It was quiet out there now, but in the distance, north and south, you heard muffled uproars as though what had begun and ended here was happening there now. It was quiet out there, too quiet, not even the wounded groaned; there were no wounded; the artillery had turned them into dead. In the feeble starlight nothing was visible, only vague outlines as of a rise of ground, just at a distance, you imagined, for the English trenches to crest; only that and close by the short, shadowy posts across which the German barbed entanglements were strung. Slowly the silence grew upon you. And then I heard the hiss of a rocket. I watched its arc of yellow sparks. I watched its burst, and in its light I saw that which I pray my eyes may never behold again. I saw in that eerie radiance the glistening, puddled field and across it, on the upward sloping ground what you might have thought were innumerable graves, but which you knew to be the bodies of men, fallen as they had come at the charge; in twos--threes--I counted ten in a perfect row; and behind them were more of these lumps which seemed to be of the earth, for they were the color of that blackish field; and there the mounds seemed higher, as though a pile of them lay there; and you heard the hissing rockets, and their greenish fires seemed to be now of that green which sometimes burns on an altar's rail. And then the rockets stopped, and the field of the dead was shut from your eyes.... If only a sound would come from out there.... I found the Lieutenant in his bombproof. "I have been waiting for you," he called in a cheery way, and he reached down under the empty cartridge box. "Cognac," he exclaimed, producing a flask. "It will taste good now." "I suppose," I nodded. I admired his unshaking hand as he poured out the liquid. "There's only one glass," he smiled. "Go ahead, I insist."