Night falls and it is very dark. We are able to advance with more security now. Yawning craters open at our feet; we risk falls and sprains at every step. * * * * * It is the dead of night when we reach the place where our company was decimated. An immense mass of humanity fills the place with a tragic tangle of intertwined corpses. Burned with powder, licked by the flames, torn and blown to pieces, the bodies cling to the wall as if they wanted to fly from the deadly fire coming from the depths of the earth. Indeed, planted on this host of bodies, his legs sinking in up to his knees, the body of Sergeant Bacque seems to point out the road to deliverance with a gesture. His hands hold the pickets of a cheval de frise. A shell decapitated him at the very moment when he jumped and death fixed him in this attitude. Thin smoke still comes from the bottom of this sinister vat! It is Hell in all its horror. The men saw death coming and tried to flee, but death was victor and fixed them to the spot. The burial of our friends would be a titanic task for our exhausted strength. We gather into a single pile the scattered bodies which the explosion hurled to a distance. With some barbed wire we hang the company’s wreath on the cheval de frise which commands the great grave. It faces the Boches. To-morrow at sunrise they can see it from their nearest trench and read on its tricolored ribbon the inscription, “To our comrades, to our brothers, from the survivors of the second company of machine guns.” They will see how we pay homage to our heroes even under the threat of their shells. The drone of a cannon sounds in the English sector in the distance. One might think that there was a tacit truce on our side to let the dead sleep more peacefully in their last sleep. We remain there kneeling before the hecatomb. Our lips search for the prayers of our childhood to lay our dead at rest, but they have lost the habit of prayer and our memories fail at the first words. We wish a prayer which shall give their final blessing to the bodies stretched out there, but above all we want a prayer which shall give a kindly consolation in the approaching hour of anguish to those who wait—to the mothers, wives, sweethearts, who do not know, who hope and live in the dream of their joyous return. And our scepticism makes us unable to pray. The darkness of the night is absolute. The charnel-house of our comrades is only a dark mass in the shadows. A pungent, pestilential odor already rises; we sense the sinister rustling of the rats which slip between the bodies. Groans rise on all sides in the darkness. Some shriek horribly in their agony; there are long wails; plaintive sing-songs call beloved names, childish words. Death, with its accomplice, Darkness, gleans the last rebellious one who clings desperately to life. * * * * *