Perhaps the most vivid and ecstatic description of a fight for trenches that was written in the course of the war or has been written since was from the pen of Rheinhold Eichacker, a German officer on the Western front. It was published in one of the German papers from which it was translated for the benefit of the New York _Times_. It deserves a permanent place in the historic record of desperate deeds of courage as an example of thoroughly adequate treatment, in literary form, of what may be styled “compound heroism.” The passionate frenzy of a personal experience could not be made more graphic with mere words as tools. The occasion was less feelingly covered by the German Army report, which said: “After a lengthy artillery preparation, white and colored Frenchmen attacked our positions in heavy force. They succeeded in getting a foothold in some of our most advanced trenches. A furious counter-attack drove them back again in a hand-to-hand encounter. Nothing else of importance.” But let us have Rheinhold Eichacker: “At 7.15 in the morning the French attacked. The black Senegal negroes, France’s cattle for the shambles. After a seven-hour suffocating drumfire that, according to all human reckoning, should not have left a mortal man alive. But we still lived—and waited. Six meters under the sod lay our ‘waiting rooms.’ Burrowed into the ground on a slant. ‘Courage bracers,’ they call them out there. “At 7.15 the enemy shifted his fire backward upon our reserves. Our pickets sounded the alarm. We sprang to arms, with our gas masks in place. For a few seconds the trenches resembled an antheap. There was feverish hurrying, running, shouting, and shoving. Just for seconds. Then everybody was at his post. Everybody who was alive. Every one a rock in the seething waves. Every one determined to hold his position against hell itself.” “LET THEM COME”