The trenches were so close together we fought with grenades instead of rifles. The wire in front, thrown out loose from the trench behind, was all shot up. The trench itself from continued bombardment was thirty or forty feet across the top, with just a narrow path down the middle, where one walked below the ground level. The hills were a wilderness of craters, blown out trenches with unexploded shells about. Crosses leaning over dead men’s graves, were littered with ragged, empty sandbags, while pieces of splintered timber, tangled wire, mingled with broken boulders and lacerated tree trunks of all lengths and thickness. Holes grew now where trees had stood. Roots and stumps, upturned, replaced splintered branches and scorched, withered leaves. A few straggling, upright trunks, eighty to one hundred feet in the air, were festooned with sections of blown-up barbed wire. The towns belonged to the dead, wholly deserted by civilians, with even the old women gone. Roofless, doorless, windowless ruins, twisted iron girders and fantastically broken walls, stood out against the sky, grimly eloquent, though silent, monuments of kultur. Face to face with death, what is in a man comes out. I shall never forget one, who, right name unknown, came from Marseilles. We used to call him “Coquin de Dieu.” He had some system whereby he got extra wine—even at the front. That additional cup or two was just enough to make him happy and start him singing. Handsome as a woman, he looked the careless, reckless ne’er-do-well. During a terrific bombardment, I was sent to relieve him, out between two German outposts, one eight, the other fifteen yards away. Instead of going to the safety of the sap in the rear, that Frenchman insisted on staying with me. Germans broke into the French trench at the adjoining post, and went to the right. Had they come left, we would have been the first victims. There was little Maurice, just twenty, who had been through the whole campaign. When dodging shells, he could drop quicker than a flapper and come up laughing every time. Maribeau, eighteen, only a boy, always objected to throwing grenades. “No, I won’t—I promised my mother and my father I would not become a grenadier and I won’t.” One night during a Boche grenade attack, he and everyone else had to work for self-preservation. He liked it and became a splendid bomb thrower. Was with Renaud, an old 170th boy, and Marti, on post, during a Boche bombardment and attack. Marti was killed by a grenade. A crapouillot fell into the trench behind. I was pretty busy throwing grenades, but caught a glimpse of a stray sergeant pulling Renaud under cover. Several days later, noticing a haversack hanging on the side of the trench, I wondered why it was there so long, also whose it might be. Inside was a piece of bread and a flat tin plate perforated by shell and splinters. Scribbled on the plate was the name, “Renaud.”