We joke Rerat about the size of the French rivers. I told him that one of our soldiers lay badly wounded near the river, and I offered him a pull at my canteen. Raising himself on one elbow and throwing out his arm in a Sir Philip Sydney fashion, he exclaimed, “Give it to the Ourcq, it needs it more than I do.” The Germans nearly had a grim joke on me during the action. We picked up our dead in the town, and I had the Pioneers dig me a long trench on the south side of the cemetery wall, which screened them from observation while their own trench would give protection. I said “This spot is the safest place in France.” We finished our sad task and went away. A few hours later I passed that way again and found that the wall against which I was sitting was smashed to the ground; a tree eight inches in diameter which had shaded me was blown in two, and two other missiles had exploded five feet from the line of graves. Evidently a German aviator, seeing the freshly turned earth, thought that it was a gun emplacement and dropped three of his nasty eggs. I smiled grimly as my words came back, “The safest place in France.” Going through the woods I heard John McMorrow discussing a date with Monzert of Headquarters Company, and he was saying, “It happened the first day we went over. I tell you it was. It was on the mornin’ that we crossed the O’Rourke River and captured Murphy’s Farm.” Colonel McCoy felt deeply grieved at the news of Quentin Roosevelt’s heroic death in an air battle some time before, as he knew him from boyhood, having been military aide at the White House during part of President Roosevelt’s term of office. We knew that Lieutenant Roosevelt had met his death in this sector, and our Colonel had instituted inquiries to find if any person had discovered his grave. Word was brought to him that the grave had been found in the sector to our right, which was occupied by the 32nd Division, and Colonel McCoy determined to have it suitably marked. I had a cross made and inscribed by Julius Horvath, and the Colonel with Lieutenant Preston and myself went by automobile to the place to erect it over the grave. We found the roughly made cross formed from pieces of his broken plane that the Germans had set to mark the place where they buried him. The plot had already been ornamented with a rustic fence by the soldiers of the 32nd Division. We erected our own little monument without molesting the one that had been left by the Germans. It is fitting that enemy and friend alike should pay tribute to heroism.