Sidney D. Light's WWI Diary, Postcards & Letters, 329th Battery Book Accounts

       Fields---gray, empty and barren, or torn and ugly and labyrinthed with a frenzy of barbed wire.

       Houses---squat, worn, hopeless little shacks, marking the outskirts of Toul.  And then---

       Hospitals---groups and acres and mountains of them, housing, no doubt, their full quota of the miseries of war.

        Crosses---plain, homely, slat-affairs, rows upon rows of them, marking the graves of buddies "Gone West."

       Cripples---more than there ought to be---huddled ahead, gazing at our outfit as though to say, "Lucky dogs---rotten chances."

       A funeral procession---laying another Yank away "with military honors."  Or did they have time for them?  Why wouldn't a martial tune from the band serve just as well?  He can't hear that.

       A turn in the road.  A post with a sign on it---"ONE WAY ROAD." We blink at it.  The thought flashes through our minds, "I wonder if it will be for any of us---,"  Then we remember, as though recalling a memory, that one-way roads are often a traffic necessity up near the front.  Then the tension snaps.  We laugh.

       "And the Caissons go rolling along!"