The Glory of the Coming by Irvin S. Cobb

THREE of us, correspondents, had gone up with a division of ours that was taking over one of the Picardy sectors. The French, moved out by degrees as we by degrees moved in. On the night when we actually came into the front lines two of us slept -- or tried to -- in a house of a village perhaps a mile and a half behind the forward trenches. The third man went on perhaps a half mile nearer the trouble zone with a battalion of an infantry regiment that on the morrow would relieve some sorely battered poilus in the trenches. It is with an experience of this third man I now mean to deal.

He found lodgment in a chateau on the outskirts of a village the name of which does not matter -- and probably never will matter again, seeing that it fairly was blasted out of the earth by its foundations the next time the Germans attempted to resume their advance toward the Channel. As for the chateau, which likewise must be quite gone by now, it was more of a chateau than some of the buildings that go by this high-sounding title in the edges of Normandy.