Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/214

 are no brancardiers here since it is a relay station; and so we eat with them. They are a queer lot, simply four old soldiers who can't fight any more, who have been detailed to bury all the dead from one of our regiments, the two hundred and twenty-first. They showed me the record which they keep of the bodies and it contained the names of twenty soldiers who have been killed during the six days the division has been in the trenches. I had no idea that the mortality would be so low along an average front like Champagne at the present time. For this means less than one man in ten killed in a whole year of fighting. I told them that I was going back to America soon and they gave me, to take along a souvenir, one of the little red, white and blue targets which are placed on the grave of every French soldier.

The town seems to have received two very heavy bombardments since the war began. While I was wandering around taking pictures, after I left the members of the cemetery department, I came across a house, not so badly wrecked as the others, from which, if I climbed up onto the roof, I thought I might get a good view of the trenches. The stairs leading up to the second floor had been shot away; and as I was hunting for some projecting timber by which I might pull myself up, my eyes fell upon two inscriptions scrawled upon the plaster. The first