Sitting at the bottom of the trench, my hands crossed over my raised knees, I hear before and behind me, over the whole plain, the sharp thud of pickaxes against stones, the scraping of spades throwing up the earth, the careful murmur of lowered voices. Occasionally, some man whom one cannot see, coughs and expectorates. The night envelops and hides us from the enemy's eyes, permitting us at last to bury our dead. The voice of my sergeant calls to me through the darkness: "Are you there, Lieutenant?" "Yes, I am here!" Groping about until he finds my hand, he places something into it. "Here, sir. This is all we found on them." Crouching at the bottom of the trench, I strike a match. In the light it sheds for a brief spell, I see a much-worn pocket book, a leather purse, and an identification disc attached to a piece of black cord. A second match! The pocket book contains the photograph of a young woman nursing a baby in her lap; also I am enabled to make out a name inscribed in straggling letters on the disc. The sergeant comments: "There was nothing on the other--I searched him from his heels to his--his neck--I mean the one whose head was blown off. And there was nothing except the purse which belonged to him." A third match. The purse contains a little money, a few coppers only, and a piece of dirty, crumpled paper, on which is written: "Gronin Charles, Railway employee. Class, 1904. Soissons." Then the match goes out. I shake the sergeant's hand; it is damp and feverish, and the fingers are not steady. "Good-night! Go and sleep! Go on!" He departs, leaving me solitary and alone in the midst of fast sleeping men. To sleep like them!... To be able to stifle all thought, to forget! In my hand the little possessions of the dead men grow heavier and heavier.... "Gronin Charles, railway employee...." The smiling faces of the photograph dance beneath my closed eyelids, grow bigger and bigger until they become almost a hallucination. The poor, poor people! _Thursday, September 10th._ Something splashes gently on my face: raindrops large and tepid. Have I indeed been asleep, then? And what time can it be? The wind is rising, but the night is still black. A little to the right front of the trench a dark mass is outlined against the still darker sky. That must be the heaped-up bundles of straw in which the major, the captain and his messengers have ensconced themselves for the night. I have just settled to sleep again when a few bullets whistle overhead. It seems to me that they come from close at hand. Yet we, being the advance posts, can have no other detachments before us. What does it mean then? I am not permitted much time for speculation; abruptly, a concentrated fusillade breaks out, every second approaching nearer and nearer and extending the whole length of the line. Without doubt, those are Germans firing, directing a night attack against us. "On your feet, every man of you. On your feet. Quick. Get up!"