[56] Among them was Second-Lieutenant Gautier. The following order, communicated to us by his family, was found with his papers: "Monsieur Gautier,--By superior orders, I am sending a section to relieve you, and to instruct you to go with your section near the cemetery, behind the wall or on the railway embankment, as may seem best to you and to the officer in the adjoining trenches. Des Pallières' section, which was in the cemetery, has been annihilated, Des Pallières himself killed and buried in the _débris_ of the trench." Second-Lieutenant Gautier was killed at 9 o'clock in the evening. "We were having our dinner in the trench," wrote Lieutenant Gamas a few days later, "when the order came for him to go to a dangerous position to replace Des Pallières, who had just been killed there. The last words your son-in-law said to me were: 'Captain, it's my turn.' We shook hands warmly, looking affectionately at each other. The next day I heard that my poor friend was dead. He had been hit in the forehead by a German bullet at the moment when, attacked by very superior numbers with three machine-gun sections, he had put his head out in order to regulate his fire and do his duty thoroughly. He fell nobly, leaving a glorious and honoured name to his wife and children." [57] All the officers we have seen or who have written to us declare that the transport service was excellent throughout the defence, in spite of the greatest difficulties, and that the naval commissariat was irreproachable. [58] He was decorated with the military medal by General Foch in person. XI. THE ATTACK ON THE CHÂTEAU DE WOUMEN All Saints' Day was nearly as quiet as the preceding forty-eight hours. We re-established our trenches, and the Admiral reorganised his regiments and transferred his headquarters to Oudecappelle. In his journal Alfred de Nanteuil, who had been with our second line from the day before, notices the truce from _marmites_, if not from shrapnel and bullets, "singing past a little like summer flies." But farms were blazing all round the vast horizon, lighting up the November night and accentuating the fact that, although the enemy's attentions had changed in form, they had put on no amenity. "One of my men," says De Nanteuil, "found the severed hand of a small child in a German's knapsack...." And at Eessen, where the _vicaire_ was a young priest of twenty-eight, the Abbé Deman, his murderers amused themselves by forcing him to dig his own grave before they shot him in the graveyard of his own church.[59]