bit my finger." I could hear him.

"That's nothing," said a voice I knew as Collette's. "Get the dirt out of his mouth."

Again a finger entered my throat, and I coughed spasmodically.

Some one was working my arms backward, and my right shoulder hurt me. I struggled up, but sank to my knees and began coughing up dirt.

"Here," says Soubiron, "turn round and spit that dirt on your parapet. It all helps." The remark made me smile.

I was quite all right now, and Soubiron, Collette, Joe, and Marcel returned to their holes. The Red Cross men were picking something out of the hole made by a 250-millimetre, they told me. It was the remnant of Corporal and Sergeant Fourrier, who had their trench to my left. It seems that a ten-inch shell had entered the ground at the edge of my hole, exploded a depth of two metres, tearing the corporal and the sergeant to pieces, and kicking several cubic metres of dirt into and on top of me. Soubiron and the Collettes saw what had happened, and immediately started digging me out. They had been just in time. It wasn't long before my strength began to come back. Two stretcher-bearers came up to carry me to the rear, but I declined their services. There was too much going on. I dug out the German overcoats, recovered some grass, and, bedding myself down in the crater made by the shell, began to feel quite safe again. Lightning never strikes twice in the same spot.

However, that wasn't much like the old-fashioned lightning. The enemy seemed to have picked upon my section. The shells were falling thicker and closer. Everybody was broad awake now, and all of us seemed to be waiting for a shell to drop into our holes. It was only a question of time before we should be wiped out. Haeffle called my attention to a little trench we all had noticed during the daytime, about forty metres in front of us. No fire had come from there, and it was evidently quite abandoned.

I took Haeffle and Saint-Hilaire with me and quietly crawled over to the trench, round the end of it, and started to enter at about the middle.

Then all of a sudden a wild yell came out of the darkness in front of us.

"Franzosen! Die Franzosen!"

We couldn't see anything, nor they either. There might have been a regiment of us, or of them for that matter. I screeched out in German, "Hände hoch!" and jumped into the trench followed by my two companions. As we crouched in the bottom, I yelled again, "Hände hoch oder wir schiessen!"

The response was the familiar "Kameraden! Kameraden!" Haeffle gave an audible chuckle.

Calling again on my German, I ordered the men to step out of the trench with hands held high, and to march toward our line. I assured the poor devils we wouldn't hurt them. They thought there was a division of us, more or less, and I don't know how much confidence they put in my assurance. Anyhow, as they scrambled over the parapet, I counted six of them prisoners to the three of us. Haeffle and Saint-Hilaire escorted them back and also took word to the second sergeant to let the section crawl, one after the other, up this trench to where I was.

One by one the men came on, crawling in single file, and I put them to work, carefully and noiselessly reversing the parapet. This German trench was very deep, with niches cut into the bank at intervals of one metre, permitting the men to lie down comfortably.

It was then that I happened to feel of my belt. One of the straps had been cut clean through and my wallet, which had held two hundred and sixty-five francs, had been neatly removed. Some one of my men, who had risked his life for mine with a self-devotion that could scarcely be surpassed, had felt that his need was greater than mine. Whoever he was, I bear him no grudge. Poor chap, if he lived he needed the money—and that day he surely did me a good turn. Besides, he was a member of the Legion.

I placed sentries, took care to find a good place for myself, and was just dropping off to sleep as Haeffle and Saint-Hilaire returned and communicated to me the captain's compliments and the assurance of a "citation."

I composed myself to sleep and dropped off quite content.

VI

It seemed but a few minutes when I was awakened by Collette and Marcel, who offered me a steaming cup of coffee, half a loaf of bread, and some Swiss cheese. This food had been brought from the rear while I was lying asleep. My appetite was splendid, and when Sergeant Malvoisin offered me a drink of rum in a canteen that he took off a dead German, I accepted gratefully. Just then the agent de liaison appeared, with the order to assemble the section, and in single file, second section at thirty-metre interval, to return the way we had come.

It was almost daylight and things were visible at two to three metres. The bombardment had died down and the quiet was hardly disturbed by occasional shots. Our captain marched ahead of the second section, swinging a cane and contentedly puffing on his pipe. Nearly everybody was smoking. As we marched along we noticed that new trenches had been dug during the night, from sixty to a hundred metres in the rear of the position we had held, and these trenches were filled by the Twenty-ninth Chasseurs Regiment, which replaced us.

Very cunningly these trenches were arranged. They were deep and narrow, fully seven feet deep and barely a yard wide. At every favorable point, on every little rise in the ground, a salient had been constructed, projecting out from the main trench ten to fifteen metres, protected by heavy logs, corrugated steel sheets, and two to three feet of dirt. Each side of the salients bristled with machine guns. Any attack upon this position would be bound to fail, owing to the intense volume of fire that could be brought to bear upon the flanks of the enemy.

To make assurance doubly sure, the Engineer Corps had dug rows of cup-shaped bowls, two feet in diameter, two feet deep, leaving but a narrow wedge of dirt between each two; and in the center of each bowl was placed a six-pointed twisted steel "porcupine." This instrument, no matter how placed, always presents a sharp point right at you. Five rows of these man-traps I counted, separated by a thin wall of dirt, not strong enough to maintain the weight of a man, so that any one who attempted to rush past would be thrown against the "porcupine" and be spitted like a pigeon. As an additional precaution a mass of barbed wire lay in rolls, ready to be placed in front of this ouvrage, to make it safe against any surprise.

We marched along, talking and chatting, discussing this and that, without a care in the world. Every one hoped we were going to the rear to recuperate and enjoy a good square meal and a good night's rest. Seeger wanted a good wash, he said. He was rather dirty, and so was I. My puttees dangled in pieces round my calves. It seems I had torn them going through the German wire the day before. I told Haeffle to keep his eyes open for a good pair on some dead man. He said he would.

The company marched round the hill we descended so swiftly yesterday and, describing a semicircle, entered again the Schützengraben Spandau and marched back in the direction we had come from. The trench, however, presented a different appearance. The bad places had been repaired, the loose dirt had been shoveled out, and the dead had disappeared. On the east side of the trench an extremely high parapet had been built. In this parapet even loopholes appeared—rather funny-looking loopholes, I thought; and when I looked closer, I saw that they were framed in by boots! I reached my hand into several of them as we walked along, and touched the limbs of dead men. The engineer, it seems, in need of material, had placed the dead Germans on top of the ground, feet flush with the inside of the ditch, leaving from six to seven inches between two bodies, and laying another body crosswise on top of the two, spanning the gap between them. Then they had shoveled the dirt on top of them, thus