"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