My companion, happily, was
not hurt, so he could take me to Vermelles, where the
ambulance service was. The same evening they gave me the
military medal, for which I had already been proposed three
times."
After three months of suffering, borne without complaint, this man died
without having been able to get a word to his parents. The abbe had
become deeply attached to him, and the whole hospital corps felt the
loss of his courageous presence.
Some of the horror of war is in these pages, as where the author says:
The doctors worked till 3 o'clock this morning. They had to
amputate arms and legs affected with gangrene. The operating
room was a sea of blood.
Some of the pathos of war is here, and even a little of its humor, but
most of all its courage. Both of the latter are mingled in the case of
an English soldier who was brought in wounded from the field of
Soissons.
"I fought until such a day, when I was wounded."
"And since then?"
"Since then I have traveled."
An English infantry officer, a six-footer, brought to the hospital with
his head bandaged in red rather than white, showed the abbe his cap and
the bullet hole in it.
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