The author relates several episodes
illustrating both points. Here are two:
"The regulars are no good," said a brave peasant reservist.
"They struck me with the butts of their rifles on my wound.
They broke and threw away all that I had. The reserves arrive,
and it is different; they take care of me. My comrade, wounded
in the breast, was dying of thirst; he actually died of it a
little while afterward. I dragged myself up to go and seek
water for him; the young fellows aimed their guns at me. I was
obliged to make a half-turn and lie down again."
Another, who also begins by praising the German field officers, saw
soldiers of the active army stripping perfectly nude one of our men who
had a perforated lung, and whom they had made prisoner after his wound:
"When they saw that they would have to abandon him, they took
away everything from him, even his shirt, and it was done in
pure wickedness, since they carried nothing away."
One of the most amazing escapes is that of a soldier from Bordeaux, told
partly in his own racy idiom, and fully vouched for by the author. After
relating how he left the railway at Nanteuil and traversed a hamlet
pillaged by the Germans he continues:
We form ourselves into a skirmish line.
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