“Blow out the light, you damn fool,” I called.

“All right,” and he did so and I started back.  As he answered me I heard simultaneously the report of a rifle and the whiz of a bullet passing me.  When I got to the door I stumbled over the body of my friend Dave; he had received the summons through the head.

While standing guard at the open door, before Dave came, with the light out, however, I suddenly got a start that frightened me more than anything else that has happened me in France:  In the gleam of a distant flare, the white faces of two women peered around the corner of the building, looking at me through the open door.  There was something so damnably uncanny in their appearance, and so startling, that a cold sweat broke out over me, and I snapped my rifle to the present.  Had they not been women they would not have lived; a loiterer around headquarters takes his life in his hands.

They had been there that same afternoon, saying they were the owners of the place, and that they had stopped to take away some supplies.  They were permitted to take their goods with them, but were warned against coming there again.  They did not heed the warning.  I reported their presence to the O.C. and they were promptly arrested and handed over to the French police.  What their lot was I cannot tell, but to this day I can’t help thinking that in some way poor Dave owes his fate to those women.

After two days’ hard marching we reached Givenchy June 9, 1915, a little town in France lying thirty miles south of Ypres.  Our battery of two guns took up its position immediately outside, on the southwest side of the town.  A few civilians were scattered through the town, living in the cellars, the rest having fled at the German approach.  We were ordered to put our guns in the very front-line trench for the reason that the opposing trenches being so close together, it was impossible for the guns to do justice to themselves without inflicting serious casualties on our own men.  To make our work as noiseless as possible, we took a number of old rubber tires, cut them in strips and wrapped them around the gun wheels with hay wire; this facilitated both the movement of the guns and the preservation of silence.

We again had the honor of being the sacrifice battery for the division—­in other words, having the profound pleasure of going heavenward, or in the other direction, before any of the others, for the purpose of working out the plan of action by the Command.  We got the guns into position under cover of night, and thoroughly camouflaged them with grass and tree branches.  We did the job so artistically that the birds would come and chatter and sing immediately over the guns when they were not telling their tale of love to Fritz.

Out in front of our guns was a small ridge or embankment, gradually sloping up to a height of twenty feet and extending east and west for a distance of three or four hundred yards.  This rising piece of ground was a decided obstacle to our progress and it was ordered mined for the purpose of leveling it.  The engineers attended to the task.  It turned out that Fritz also had mined the ridge in order to blow our sector skyward.