Many French civilians and visiting soldiers lined the edges or looked down from points of vantage on the hillside. I stood on one side about one hundred feet from the "trap." At nine fifty a Red Cross ambulance drove up, and the prisoner, his hands bound behind him, alighted, and accompanied by a guard and the officials, walked up a dozen wooden steps to the platform. He was escorted to the front of the platform, and in a clear, strong voice spoke to the almost breathless crowd. He acknowledged with sorrow his crime, and urged upon all the necessity of being true to God and their country. He stepped back on the "trap," the black cap was drawn over his head, the noose placed about his neck, the "trap" sprung, and with a sickening thud he dropped to his doom. For twenty minutes, from nine fifty to ten ten, his body hung there before he was pronounced by the attending surgeon officially dead. I never witnessed a twenty minutes of such deathly silence. Two guards fainted, and the effect on the crowd was indescribable. I overheard a colored fellow say, "I never want to do anything bad again as long as I live." The body was immediately cut down, placed in a coffin, and taken in the ambulance to its burial. It was a silent, thoughtful company that went out from that tragic scene. "THE AMERICAN DEAD" "Will we be able to locate the body of our boy?" So often has this question been asked me that I must take a moment to answer it. I watched two American military burial plots grow from the first lone grave to small cities of our noble dead. One was at Bazoilles, half way between Chaumont and Toul. The other was at Baccarat near the Alsatian border. Each grave was marked with a little wooden cross bearing the name and rank of the soldier, and beside each cross an American flag. Many were buried in French cemeteries. At Neufchateau a section was set aside for the use of our American army. When I visited it there were about one hundred new-made graves all plainly marked, and fresh flowers on each grave. Of course most of the French cemeteries were Catholic, and Protestant bodies could not be granted burial within the walls. A touching story is told of an American Protestant soldier buried close outside the wall of a Catholic graveyard. During the night French civilians tore down the wall at that place and rebuilt it around their comrade of a different faith. It was a beautiful symbol of the new dawn of peace when all nations and all creeds shall recognize the common brotherhood of all God's children. FRANCE A GREAT SCRAP HEAP Now that the war is over, France is a vast junk heap of arms and equipment that cost a mint of money and the brains and lives of millions of men. For generations to come the soil of France will be disclosing to the peasants who till her fields, the fragments of war's destructive power and the bones of heroes who bled and died.