As he finished speaking one of the trapped soldiers crawled out. He pulled himself along with one arm, for the other was terribly shattered; one of his legs hung only by a tendon and a few shreds of flesh.
"Quick, Leon!" cried Jacques. "Cut the cord from your bandolier; you tie up his arm and I'll attend to his leg. We must stop this flow of blood or he'll die."
The wounded soldier was a fine, healthy boy; a few minutes before he had been telling what he planned to do when he went home on a furlough. Now his face was white with agony; his voice grew weaker and weaker and he died while Jacques and Leon were working over him.
"This is awful," cried Leon fiercely.
"This is war," said Jacques.
High explosive shells were now bursting all along the line; tons of earth were thrown high into the air and the very ground rocked beneath their feet. Men hurried from one spot to another trying to find protection where there was none; oftentimes masses of earth were blown in on top of them.
"Picks and shovels!" came the cry, and "Stretcher bearers! Stretcher bearers!" resounded on all sides.
"The rest of those men in the dug-out are dead, Leon," said Jacques calmly. "We can do nothing for them and the thing for us to do is to rejoin our company."
"Think of it," exclaimed Leon as they hurried along. "If we'd stayed in that dug-out two minutes longer we'd been dead now."
"Death comes quickly in war," remarked Jacques. "It hangs by a thread and you never can tell when it is going to strike you."