“We saw some horrible things in Lucy, At one house we found an old French woman, She said she was with her three daughters—16, 18, and 20 years old—when the Germans came, and they had remained there without any protection from the Huns who took charge of the house. We asked where her daughters were and she said they were upstairs and she guessed they were asleep. “Several of us went to learn the fate of the girls and we found all three stretched out with their throats cut from ear to ear, and their bodies horribly slashed. The Germans had deliberately butchered them when they were forced out of the town. “When we told the old lady of the fate of her daughters she was stricken with heart trouble and died in a few minutes, but before she died she asked that we bury her with the three girls in the little grove near her home. We did it although we were under fire the whole time, and eight of our men were killed while burying those French women. “The next day we pushed on and got through the woods. That was the hottest fighting of all. The Germans used more artillery, and when the day was over the number of men in my company had again been reduced to about 150. Some companies had only a dozen or fifteen men left. “One of the fellows killed that day was a fellow from South Baltimore who used to be a chum of mine before we went to war. His name was Halle. He said to me that morning: ‘Jim, I feel I’m going to get knocked off to-day. Never tell my people that I was killed. Just tell them that I am somewhere in France.’ He was killed and I haven’t told his people and never will, but they found it out through the War Department. “We next went to the Marne. There we fought in the river. It was tough luck for a fellow to be wounded there, for as he sank down he was drowned. It was often close fighting, bayonet to bayonet in midstream, and must have been a pretty sight for people to look at if there’d been any spectators there, but it wasn’t very pretty for those in the fight. “After the Marne battle our company’s ranks had to be filled again. Once more we had been reduced to about 150. “Next we went to Château-Thierry and fought there for nine days, which was followed by a three-day hike to Soissons, which we reached on July 18, 1918. The next day we went over the top at 3 a.m. “Ten minutes later I went down with a wound that crippled my ankle. I was gassed, too, and suffered shock. When I came to my senses in a hospital I had two other wounds that I didn’t know anything about. They told me that as the ambulance was carrying me to the rear it was struck by a shell which killed some of the other wounded men and presented me with a couple more wounds for good measure. “Outside of having been in a bunch of hospitals in France and America that’s about all I know about the war,” concluded “Jimmie” Gardener. “You haven’t told why you got the Croix de Guerre and the palm branch,” we suggested.