Thoroughly tired, I spread my blanket on the floor and fell quickly to sleep. I dreamed I was tied to a railroad track with a train rushing towards me. With a start I awoke, just as a siren voiced shell came screaming across the fields, bursting at the foot of the hill on which the church stood. The gas alarm was at once sounded and every trooper sought refuge in the dugouts. It was then half-past eight. At four-minute intervals and with the most deadly regularity these shells came at us for four nerve-racking hours. Boom! You could hear it leave the eight-inch howitzer six miles away, then in a high tenor pitch, it rushed toward you with a crescendo of sound, moaning, wailing, screaming, hissing, bursting with frightful intensity apparently in the center of your brain. Falling here, there, and everywhere in the ruins and environs of the village, mustard gas, flying steel and mortar, levied cruel toll on six boys, whose mangled bodies I laid away the following afternoon at Griscourt under the hill. One of these, I now recall, was Corporal Donald Bryan of the 7th Engineers, a most handsome and talented young man who, before the war, had won fame in the field of movie drama. "Where were you last night?" inquired gallant Colonel Cummings of Missouri, our Machine Gun Regimental Commander. "In the sacristy," I replied. "The worst possible place for you!" he exclaimed; "you would find it far safer in a dugout." I preferred the sacristy, however, for its convenience to the altar, where I could say daily Mass, and so won my point. Chaplain and burial work had been meanwhile growing tremendously. Burial details to be organized, equipped and dispatched far and wide along the front; conferences with Chaplains; forwarding to them of Departmental Orders; receiving their weekly reports, and compiling these in daily reports to the Graves Registration Service; with monthly reports to be prepared for Bishop Brent at Chaumont, Monsignor Connolly at Paris, and Archbishop Hayes at New York. At this time welfare workers joined us and we had thirty Y. M. C. A. secretaries under Rev. Mr. Todd; eight American Red Cross secretaries under Mr. Kolinski of Chicago; six Salvation Army lady secretaries under Adjutant Mr. Brown, and ten Knights of Columbus secretaries under Mr. McCarthy of Kansas City, who joined us at Bouillonville. All these workers rendered most valuable and devoted service; especially at a time and place when we were far afield in ruined shell-swept areas, and completely cut off from every vestige of ordinary comforts. How good a bar of chocolate, a stick of Black Jack, a "dash" of despised inglorious "goldfish" tasted to Buddie, lying cold, hungry, dirty and "cootified" in his dugout!