Hardly five hundred yards away from our park some big farm buildings suddenly burst into flames, the walls surrounding the yard showing up on the bare fields like a massive square of luminous masonry. The smoke at first rose in heavy, dark spirals pierced here and there by yellow flashes and then shot straight up into the clear sky in a tall column. We knew that there were sheep in the farm. The bombardment had ceased, and I decided to save one or two of the animals in order to supplement our ordinary rations. Two gunners of the 12th Battery, the carriages of which were lined up close to ours, had the same idea. We set out for the farm as rapidly as possible. The field we had to cross had been ploughed up yesterday by the German Howitzers. The enemy doubtless thought that infantry lay concealed behind the buildings, and the whole day long his heavy guns had vainly mown down the mangel-wurzels. "They've gone to work as though they wanted to plant trees in fives," remarked one of my companions. And he added: "And they've done the job jolly well! I know something about it, for I'm a gardener." On the edge of a shell crater two gendarmes lay stretched side by side among the scattered clods of earth. One of them, a big, red-haired man, had a great gaping wound in his chest, and his right arm, doubled up in a strange posture, looked as if it had two elbows. The body of the other, a grey-headed corporal, seemed untouched, but in one of his eye-sockets there was nothing but a clot of blood, and the eye itself was hanging on his temple at the end of a white tendon. "Poor old chap!" said the gardener. He leaned over the corpse with its ghastly, one-eyed face staring at the sky, and reverently covered it with the silver-badged cap which had fallen near the dead man's side. * * * * * Behind one of the blue-slated roofs, which was still intact, lively flames were now breaking out but were immediately stifled by the clouds of smoke. A magnificent cone-shaped fir-tree, of funereal aspect, mounted guard over the fire like a solitary sentry. We approached the building. Near the wall of the yard were lying two gunners and a couple of horses. They had just been killed, and the blood on the ground was still red. I recognized one of the men as the orderly of one of our officers. The other had fallen face downwards, his arms crossed under him. A shell had bored a great hole in the yard. Three ducks, despite the heat of the flames, were dabbling about in a little green pond near a square-shaped dunghill. Another, the head of which had been cut off by a shell splinter, was lying on its side at the edge of the water.