It is a paradise [added the wounded man.] 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 abbé. "In a few weeks I shall be cured and will return to the front."

Abbé Klein tells the curious story of a Zouave and his faithful dog. In one of the zigzag corridors connecting the trenches near Arras the man was terribly wounded by a shell that killed all his companions and left him three-quarters buried in the earth. With only the dead around him, he "felt himself going to discouragement," to use the author's mild phrase, when his dog, which had never left him since the beginning of the war, arrived and began showing every sign of distress and affection. The wounded man told the author:

It is not true that he dug me out, but he roused my courage. I commenced to free my arms, my head, the rest of my body. Seeing this, he began scratching-with all his might around me, and then caressed me, licking my wounds. The lower part of my right leg was torn off, the left wounded in the calf, a piece of shell in the back, two fingers cut off, and the right arm burned. I dragged myself bleeding to the trench, where I waited an hour for the litter carriers. They brought me to the ambulance post at Roclincourt, where my foot was taken off, shoe and all; it hung only by a tendon. From there I was carried on a stretcher to Anzin, then in a carriage to another ambulance post, where they carved me some more.... My dog was present at the first operation. An hour after my departure he escaped and came to me at Anzin.

But when the Zouave was sent to Neuilly the two friends had to separate. At the railway station he begged to take his dog along, and told his story; but the field officer, touched though he was, could not take it upon himself to send a dog on a military train. The distress of both man and beast was so evident that more than one nurse had tears in her eyes as the train pulled out.

They tried to pet the dog, dubbed him Tue-Boches, offered him dog delicacies of all sorts, but in vain. He refused all food and remained for two days "sad to death." Then some one went to the American Hospital, told how the dog had saved the Zouave, and the upshot of it was that the faithful animal, duly combed and passed through the disinfecting room, was admitted to the hospital and recovered his master and his appetite. But at last accounts his master was still very weak, and "in the short visit which the dog is allowed to make each day, he knows perfectly, after a tender and discreet good morning, how to hold himself very wisely at the foot of the bed, his eyes fixed upon his patient."

Thanks to modern science, the cases of tetanus are few in this war, but there are many deaths from gangrene, because, with no truce for the removal of the wounded, so many lie for days before receiving medical aid. Abbé Klein tells of one Breton boy, as gentle a soul as his sister—"my little Breton," he always calls him, affectionately—and comments again and again upon the boy's patient courage amid sufferings that could have but one end. The infection spread in spite of all that science could do, and even amputation could not save him. At last he ceased to live, "like a poor little bird," as his French attendant, herself a mother with three boys in the army, said with tears.

Saddest of all are the bereaved wives and mothers. The reader will find many of them in the good Chaplain's book, and they will bring the war closer than anything else. Sometimes they stand mute under the blow, looking on the dead face without a sound, and then dropping unconscious to the floor. Sometimes they cry wild things to heaven. The Chaplain's work in either case is not easy, and some of his most touching pages depict such scenes.

There was a boy of twenty years, who was slowly but surely dying of gangrene. Let the abbé tell the end of the story:

At 9 o'clock the parents arrive. Frightened at first by the change, they are reassured to see that he is suffering so little, and soon leave him, as they think, to rest. When they return at 10, suddenly called, their child is dead. Their grief is terrible. The father still masters himself, but the mother utters cries. They are led to the chapel, while some one comes to look for me. The poor woman, who was wandering about stamping and wringing her hands, rushes to me and cries, no, it is not possible that her son is dead, a child like that, so healthy, so beautiful, so lovable; she wishes me to reassure her, to say it is as she says. Before my silence and the tears that come to my eyes her groans redouble, and nothing can calm her: "But what will become of us? We had only him."