Next morning I buried, near the ruined church, the bodies of the sergeants who had been killed a few doors from us; and on the following day I laid to rest, side by side, in one long grave, two drivers who had died at their posts in the Square, together with an officer and twenty men belonging to the 1st Queen’s Westminster Rifles. *VII* *"NOW THE DAY IS OVER"* Achicourt is a little village about a mile out of Arras. It has two churches, one Roman Catholic, the other, Lutheran. The former church has been utterly destroyed by German shells, and will have to be rebuilt from the foundations. The Lutheran church was less prominently placed, and its four walls are still standing. Its humility has saved it, but, as by fire. All its windows are gone, and its walls are torn and scarred by fragments of shells. Most of its slates have been destroyed and the rain pours through the roof. But, on dry days, and until the Battle of Arras, it was a beloved little place for services. It stood, however, at a corner of the village Square, and the Square was destroyed by hundreds of exploding shells on Easter Sunday. As I passed it in the afternoon of that day, and saw how it had suffered, my heart grew sad within me. Often it had sheltered us at worship, and many of our most sacred memories will, for ever, cling like ivy to its walls. The door was smashed in, the vestibule torn into strips as by lightning. The pews were strewn on the floor with their backs broken; even the frames of the windows had been blown out. There was a little portable organ that we had used with our hymns, and it lay mutilated on the floor like a slaughtered child. The floor was white with plaster, as when a sharp frost has brought low the cherry blossom. Never again, I thought, should I gather my men for worship within its humble, hospitable walls. One more of the beautiful and sacred things of life had perished in this all-devouring war. Only the fields remained, and there all my future services must be held.