So we left the Parc and followed into the gloom of the forest and up the steep slope of the mountain. It faced the enemy's trenches. From the top one could look across the frontier of Germany.
D'Artagnan was silent now, plunging along through the deepening twilight. Suddenly we emerged on the edge of a clearing still bright with sunshine: a clearing perhaps several hundred feet square, lying on the steep hillside almost at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
D'Artagnan stopped, took off his helmet, then walked slowly into the open. We took off our hats and followed him.
The clearing was a military cemetery—it held the graves of d'Artagnan's dead. A tall white wooden cross at the top rose almost to the tops of the pines growing above it. On the cross-piece was written:
"To our comrades of the —th Brigade, killed by the enemy."
At the foot of the great cross, stretched in military alignment over the clearing were hundreds of graves headed by little crosses. So abrupt was the slope the dead soldiers stood almost erect—facing Germany. Narrow graveled walks separated them, and on each cross hung festoons of flowers kept always fresh by the comrades who remained.
We followed d'Artagnan across the silent place and stood behind him as he faced, with bared head, the great cross. He made the sign of the cross upon his breast. There was not a bowed head: we all lifted them high to read the words written there.
No one spoke; the wind rustled softly in the tops of the pines that pressed so densely about us. It was dark among the trees, but the clearing was still mellow with the fading sunlight.
"The sun always comes here first in the morning," d'Artagnan said softly, "and this is the last place from which it goes."
He swung around with his back to the great cross and flung out his alpenstock in a gesture that swept the valley before us. His voice rose harshly: