Then one day when it was quiet, at full noon, he was seen to leave the trench, a shovel in one hand and a wooden cross in the other. Everyone, breathless, saw him advance slowly, calmly——
At first the Germans fired at him several times, missing him, notwithstanding the fact they were only about ninety feet away. Then they ceased firing to see, no doubt, what this fool was going to do!
He stopped close to the Zouave's body placed his cross on the sand and staidly began to dig a grave——
When he judged it to be deep enough he put the rigid body of his comrade in and began covering him with great shovelfuls of sand. Then he smoothed the tomb, planted the cross and adjusted the red badge of death——[6]
In an impressive moment of silence—for both sides looked on without losing a single movement—they saw him advance to the head of the knoll, his face to the cross, click his heels and give the military salute——
He came back slowly to our lines and jumped briskly into the trench. Immediately he began to pace up and down before his squad back of the parapet, with fixed bayonet, facing the grave his hands had dug.
"Stand at ease!" said he, "listen carefully. My men who fall will not lack a burial nor will they lie in the open air like rotting dogs. Break!"
Fifteen days later a German bullet struck him in the head back of a loophole. He was killed instantly. His comrades interred him in the Zouave cemetery at Nieuport-Baths. They wrote his name on a piece of paper, which they rolled up and placed in a bottle——