"We had a machine gun officer with us, and at 6 o'clock a runner came up and reported that Sumner was killed. He commanded the machine gun company with us. He was hit early in the fight, by a bullet, I hear. At the start he remarked: 'This looks easy; they do not seem to have much art.'
"Well, we just lay there all through the hot afternoon.
"It was great—a shell would land near by and you would bounce in your hole.
"As twilight came we sent out water parties for the relief of the wounded. At 9 o'clock we got a message congratulating us, and saying the Algerians would take us over at midnight. We then began to collect our wounded. Some had been evacuated during the day, but at that, we soon had about twenty on the field near us.
"A man who had been blinded wanted me to hold his hand. Another, wounded in the back, wanted his head patted; and so it went; one man got up on his hands and knees; I asked him what he wanted. He said: 'Look at the full moon,' then fell dead. I had him buried, and all the rest I could find.
"The Algerians came up at midnight and we pushed out. They went over at daybreak and got all shot up. We made the relief under German flares and the light from a burning town.
"We went out as we came, through the gully and town, the latter by now all in ruins. The place was full of gas. We pushed on to the forest and fell down in our tracks and slept all day.
A FUNERAL, AT THE FRONT
"That night the Germans shelled us and got three killed and seventeen wounded. We move a bit farther back to the cross road and after burying a few Germans, some of whom showed signs of having been wounded before, we settled down to a short stay.
"It looked like rain, and so Wilmer and I went to an old dressing station to salvage some cover. We were about to go when we stopped to look at a new grave. A rude cross made of two slats from a box had written on it: