Well, alone, on a bad night, in storm and rain, he was a volunteer patrol. Alone, he brought in four German prisoners. He was a volunteer for six patrouilles of the gravest danger—not always alone, but always fetching in prisoners and more prisoners. Bad for the Germans. He carried his superior officer, wounded, out under fire and saved his life. Then there was a line of trenches where a hundred and fifty-six men—they know his name: Jacquemin! Jacquemin with the little mongrel dog always at his heels—a hundred and fifty-six men had eaten nothing for four days but the sodden bread left in their haversacks. Jacquemin filled several wagons full of bread and seating himself on the driver's seat of the first, he drove in that life-giving line under the fire of shot and shell, right into the very jaws of death. He brought sufficient supplies to save the line of trenches, for otherwise they would have had to evacuate them through starvation, as indeed was the case with others where this gay little Zouave could not reach. Just the giving of food to the faint and hungry men whose stern faces were set against death. That act brought him one of those medals across his breast—I forget which. Finally, the shot and shell which he had braved so many times was bound to get him, and with his leg and arm almost shot away he lay for dead amongst the other slain, and they buried him. They buried Jacquemin. Fortunately or unfortunately—it depends upon how he regards a life which he will live through henceforth with only one leg and only one arm—a little bit of his soldier's coat sprouted out of the ground. (They don't always bury deep on those fields.) And his dog saw it and smelled and dug and dug, and whined and cried, until they came and unburied Jacquemin and brought him back.
He is sitting up there at the Ambulance now, and his little dog is sometimes in the kitchen and sometimes comes up to the wards.
Jacquemin!
"Qu'est-ce que vous avez fait pour mériter tout cela, mon ami?"
What countless thousands of them have done, all along those lines—Englishmen and Frenchmen, Scotchmen and Irishmen, Indians, Australians, Canadians—hearts and souls and bodies offered up magnificently and valiantly sacrificed for the greatest Cause for which humanity has ever fought! Jacquemin brought them bread to the fighting line; and that great fighting line, by its efforts, is giving bread for ever to the world....
(Hundreds of these wonderful letters, revealing the great soul of this American woman, have been gathered into her book which forms one of the most beautiful insights into the "soul of the war."—Editor.)
FOOTNOTES:
[3] In speaking of the death of Comte Henry Dadvisard.