Chaplain Francis A. Kelley, in charge of our burial work, laid out the cemetery on a hill overlooking the village and the battlefield. The rest of us searched the field with details of men, brought in the bodies on limbers, searched and identified them as well as possible. In doubtful cases the final identification was made at the cemetery, where men from every regiment were working and where most soldiers would have some one to recognize them. In addition, we buried German dead on the field, marking the graves and keeping a record of their location for the Graves Registration Service. A hundred and fifty-two men were buried there at St. Souplet, the last cemetery of the Twenty-Seventh Division in their battle grounds of France. The last body of all, found after the work had been finished and the men released from duty, was buried by us chaplains and the surgeon, who went out under the leadership of Father Kelley and dug the grave ourselves. Every evening the six of us gathered about our grate fire and relaxed from the grim business of the day. If we had allowed ourselves to dwell on it, we would have been incapable of carrying on the work: it was so ghastly, so full of pathetic and horrible details. We sang, played checkers, argued on religion. Imagine us singing the "Darktown Strutters' Ball," or discussing the fundamental principles of Judaism and Christianity for several hours! The five of us were all of different creeds, too—Catholic, Baptist, Christian, Christian Scientist and Jew. Our coöperation and our congeniality were typical of the spirit of the service throughout.
On the last day we held our burial service. We gathered together at the cemetery with a large flag spread out in the middle of the plot. I read a brief Jewish service, followed by Chaplains Bagby and Stewart in the Protestant and Father Kelley in the Catholic burial service, and at the end the bugle sounded "taps" for all those men of different faiths lying there together. We could see and hear the shells bursting beyond the hill, probably a hostile scout had caught sight of us at work. Above floated a British aëroplane. Some English soldiers working on their burial plot nearby stopped their digging and listened to our service.
And so we said farewell to our lost comrades and to the war at the same time.
CHAPTER IV
AFTER THE ARMISTICE
AFTER the burial work at St. Souplet was over, great covered lorries took us back the sixty miles or more to Corbie, in the vicinity of Amiens, which was to be our rest area. We greeted its paved streets, its fairly intact houses, its few tiny shops, as the height of luxury. Here and there a roof was destroyed or a wall down, for the enemy had come within three miles of Corbie in their drives earlier in the year. But we were in rest and comparative plenty at last. We saw real civilians again, not merely the few old people and little children left behind in the towns we had liberated. We had regular meals again and a chance to purchase a few luxuries beside, such as French bread at a shop and hard candy at the "Y." We no longer heard the whine of the shell or whistle of the bullet, nor smelled gas, nor slept in cellars. I was even lucky enough to capture a thick spring mattress which, with my blankets, made a bed that even a certain staff colonel envied me. A home-made grate in the fire-place fitted it for a tiny coal fire; the window frames were re-covered with oiled paper; we read the London Daily Mail in its Paris edition only one day late, instead of seeing it every ten days and then often two weeks out of date.
My billet, which I obtained from the British town major, was a tall, narrow house just off the principal square, very pleasant indeed in dry weather. Its chief defect was a huge shell-hole in the roof through which the water poured in torrents when it rained, so that we had to cover ourselves with our rubber shelter-halves when we slept at night. The shell-hole, however, was a constant source of fuel, and we burned the laths and wood-work, of which small pieces were lying all about the top floor, until we found means to obtain a small but steady supply of coal. The house afforded room, after I had preëmpted it, for the Senior Chaplain of the Division, the Division Burial Officer and myself, together with our three orderlies.
Even in dry weather there was some excitement about the old house. There was the time when some tipsy soldiers, seeing the light in the Senior Chaplain's room late at night, mistook the place for a café and came stumbling in for a drink. When they saw the chaplain, they suddenly sobered and accepted very gravely the drink of water he offered them from his canteen. On another day the old woman who owned the house came in with her son, a French lieutenant, to take away her furniture. We did not mind losing the pretty inlaid table—we were soldiers and could stand that—but our mattresses and chairs were a different matter. None of us could argue with her torrential flow of French, but Lieutenant Curtiss, the Burial Officer, suddenly felt his real attack of flu redoubled in violence and had to take to his mattress. So the old lady finally relented sufficiently to leave us our beds and a chair or two, while her son became our devoted friend at the price of an American cigar.