“‘Where are you wounded?’ was the first question.  I could only point.  My blouse was quickly opened, and in the middle of the breast a bloody wound was found.  The balls still constantly whizzed around us; one struck the doctor’s helmet, and immediately I felt a violent blow on the left arm.  Another wound!  With difficulty I was turned round, to look for the outlet of the bullet; but it was still in my body, near the spine.  At last it was cut out.  They were going away—­’The wound in the arm, doctor.’  This, fortunately, was looked for in vain; the ball had merely caused a blue spot and had sunk harmlessly into the ground.

“I extended my hand to the doctor and thanked him, as also the attendant, whom I commissioned to ask the sergeant to send word to my family.  The doctor had carefully placed my cloak over me, with my helmet firmly on my head, in order in some measure to protect me from the leaden hail.

“Thus I lay alone with my own thoughts amid the most terrible fire for perhaps an hour and a half.  All my thoughts, as far as pain and increasing weakness allowed, were fixed on my family.  Gradually I got accustomed to the danger which surrounded me, and only when too much sand from the striking bullets was thrown on my body did I remember my little enviable position.  At last, after long, long waiting, the sanitary detachment came for me.”

THE REAL TRAGEDY OF WAR

It is not a pleasant picture—­this story of the French soldier.  It has little in it of the grandeur, the beat of drums, the sound of martial music, which is supposed to accompany war.  The tread of marching feet has died away, the excitement is gone, and man the demon is supplanted by man the everyday human creature of suffering and home folks and fear.

It is only a personal account of an individual experience, yet in it may be found the real significance and the real tragedy of war; for, after the fighting is over, after the intoxication of legalized murder has gone, after nations turn their attention from victories to men, it is the aggregate of individual experiences which counts the costs of war.

Thousands of German, French, Belgian, Austrian, Russian, and British men in the prime of life have been miserably slain and lie in obscure graves of which the enemy now is the guardian, while others writhe in the agony of lingering wounds or sullenly brood over their fate in the dull routine of military prisons.  In every part of the warring countries mothers weep over the sons they shall see no more, and wives over the husbands snatched from them forever.  In many a mansion, in many a comfortable home, in many a peasant’s cottage, the empty chair is eloquent of the absent father, brother, husband or son who shall be absent forever.

CHAPTER X

GERMAN ADVANCE ON PARIS