slope--what of him at least a bursting shell had left. On a little flat
half up sat quaint Dr. Diestelkamp, like Mark Tapley jolly under
difficulties; by his side lay a man who had just bled to death as the good
doctor explained to me. While he had been applying the tourniquet under a
hot fire his right arm had been broken; and before he could pull himself
up and go to the rear another bullet had found its billet in his thigh.
There the little man sat, contentedly smoking till somebody would be good
enough to come and take him away. Von Zuelow too--he of the gay laugh and
sprightly countenance--was on his back a little higher up, with a bullet
through the chest. I heard the ominous sound of the escaping air as I
raised him to give him a drink from my flask. What needs it to become
diffuse as to the terrible sights which that steep and the plateau above
it presented on this beautiful summer evening? It was farther to the
right, in ground more broken with gullies and ravines, that the second
battalion of the Hohenzollerns had gone up; and I wandered along there
among the carnage eking out the contents of my flask as far as I could,
and when the wounded had exhausted the brandy in it filling it up with
water and still toiling on in a task that seemed endless. At last, in a
sitting posture, his back against a hawthorn tree in one of the grassy
ravines, I saw one whom I thought I recognised. "Eckenstein!" I cried as I
ran forward; for the posture was so natural that I could not but think he
was alive. Alas! no answer came; the gallant young Feldwebel was dead,
shot through the throat. He had not been killed outright by the fatal
bullet; the track was apparent by the blood on the grass along which he
had crawled to the hawthorn tree against which I found him. His head had
fallen forward on his chest and his right hand was pressed against his
left breast. I saw something white in the hollow of the hand and easily
moved the arm for he was yet warm; it was the photograph of the little
girl he had married but three short days before. The frank eyes looked up
at me with a merry unconsciousness; and the face of the photograph was