At the dawn of a misty Sunday, July 28, the 165th had made a gallant and irresistible charge across the river and up the hill. In the height of the great five days battle for the mastery of the heights which followed Kilmer was killed. It so happened that he was close to the Major when the battalion adjutant fell and, in the emergency of the battle, without commission or appointment, he was serving as a sort of aid to the battalion commander. Discovering that the woods ahead harboured some machine guns, he had reported this fact, and was sent in the lead of a patrol to establish their exact location. When a couple of hours later the battalion advanced into the woods to clear the spot of the enemy, several of Kilmer’s comrades caught sight of him lying, as if still scouting, with his eyes bent over a little ridge. So like his living self he was, they called to him, then ran up--to find him dead with a bullet through his brain. He lies buried, we read, beside Lieutenant Oliver Ames at the edge of a little copse that is known as the Wood of the Burned Bridge, so close to the purling Ourcq that, standing by the graveside, one could throw a pebble into its waters. Perhaps ten minutes walk to the north lies the half obliterated village Seringes, captured by American troops the night before Kilmer was killed. Eloquent of affection in the making of it, the grave is of course, marked by a wooden cross, on which is written, “Sergeant Joyce Kilmer.” Then, after the inscription of his company and regiment, is the line: “Killed in Action--July 30, 1918.” It is not a rule to bury enlisted men with officers, but Kilmer had won so much admiration and respect not only from the enlisted men in his company but also from the officers, that the commander of the regiment authorised that his grave be dug on the spot and that he be buried next to the grave of the heroic Lieutenant who had just lost his life. Sergeant Woollcott was with the regiment in the woods the day they came out of the line to catch their breaths, and the news of Kilmer’s death, he says, “greeted me on every turn. The Captain under whom he had been serving for several months, the Major at whose side he fell, stray cooks, doughboys, runners--all shook their heads sorrowfully and talked among themselves of what a good soldier he had been and what an infinite pity it was that the bullet had had to single him out. And in such days as these, there are no platitudes of polite regret. When men, good men and close pals, are falling about you by hundreds, when every man in the regiment has come out of the fight the poorer for the loss of not one but many friends, there is no time to say pretty things about a man just because he exists no longer. Death is too common to distinguish anyone. So the glowing praise and admiration I heard for Joyce was real--every word of it.” It is, I think, fitting to preserve in a form more durable than its newspaper publication more of this letter. It continues: