] Now we are saved.
But what things I have seen! I have seen an officer with his
brain hanging here, over his eye. And black corpses, and
bloated horses! The saddest time is the night. One hears
cries: "Help!" There are some who call their mothers. No one
answers.
All these recitals of soldiers are stamped with the red badge of
courage. A priest serving as an Adjutant was superintending the digging
of trenches close to the firing line on the Aisne. He had to expose
himself for a space of three feet in going from one trench to another.
In that instant a Mauser bullet struck him under the left eye, traversed
the nostril, the top of the palate, the cheek bone and came out under
the right ear. He felt the bullet only where it came out, but soon he
fell, covered with blood and believed he was wounded to death. Then his
courage returned, and he crawled into the trench. Comrades carried him
to the ambulance at Ambleny, with bullets and "saucepans" raining about
them from every direction. In time he was transferred to the American
Hospital at Neuilly. "I'm only a little disfigured and condemned to
liquids," he told his friend the abbe. "In a few weeks I shall be cured
and will return to the front.
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