At one place in particular the underwood was so thick, that I had to crouch down in order to get through it. My attention was drawn thither by the signs of a path having been forced in that direction. A little further in, I found an open space of a few yards square, which was now occupied by a grave. It had no device upon it, except a cross scratched in the red clay. Lying beside it, I found a piece of shell, a religious picture, a prayer-book, and fragments of a uniform, which I still have by me. I fancy some kind comrade had paid his friend a last tribute, by giving him, as it were, a special burial in a place to himself. In order to reach the building in the centre of the wood, I had to pass through a little garden, whose only flowers seemed to be rows of dahlias, of every colour and description. Among these the shells had made havoc. In one bed, I remarked a deep hole where a shell had fallen, and some of the plants had been lifted several feet away. In other places, furrows of some yards in length were made by shot and shell, as if a plough had worked intermittently here and there. Some were deep, others just skimmed the surface and ran a zigzag course, as if a gigantic animal had been turning up the ground with his muzzle. The building, into which I made my way, seemed to be an observatory or pavilion, belonging to the Château, which stood some distance behind. Its doors and wood-work were riddled with bullets, and the roof was blown away. There, curiously enough, a large quantity of music was strewn about. Under cover of this wood, the Bois de Garenne, we had seen the French massing their troops; and they had evidently been lying here in ambush when the Prussians detected and shelled them, before the final rout, during which they abandoned their arms and ammunition. Down the slope of the hill, and in the bottom of the valley facing the Meuse, dead men and horses, with groups of hastily-dug graves,--many of them German,--and broken spears, and numbers of unsheathed cavalry swords, told the same tale of a death struggle in which hundreds must have perished. Further along the valley, beside a lonely thicket, was a large mound with a stake driven into it, and an inscription in German characters, made with some material which looked like blacking, "Here lie thirty-six men of the 5th corps". Who shall reckon the number of French dead in the many graves adjacent? As my time was up, I now hastened back to my post, feeling like one who had awakened from a terrible nightmare. Yet I was much invigorated by this expedition, so mournful in its circumstances, and went to work with renewed energy.