Such talks as I listened to that afternoon—­only yesterday—­at my gate, from such a fluent, amusing, clever French chap,—­a bicyclist in the ambulance corps,—­of the crossing the Meuse and the taking, losing, re-taking, and re-losing of Charleroi.  Oddly enough these were the first real battle tales I had heard.

It suddenly occurred to me, as we chatted and laughed, that all the time the English were here they had never once talked battles.  Not one of the Tommies had mentioned the fighting.  We had talked of “home,” of the girls they had left behind them, of the French children whom the English loved, of the country, its customs, its people, their courage and kindness, but not one had told me a battle story of any kind, and I had not once thought of opening the subject.  But this French lad of the ambulance corps, with his Latin eloquence and his national gift of humor and graphic description, with a smile in his eyes, and a laugh on his lips, told me stories that made me see how war affects men, and how often the horrible passes across the line into the grotesque.  I shall never forget him as he stood at the gate, leaning on his wheel, describing how the Germans crossed the Meuse—­a feat which cost them so dearly that only their superior number made a victory out of a disaster.

“I suppose,” he said, “that in the history of the war it will stand as a success—­at any rate, they came across, which was what they wanted.  We could only have stopped them, if at all, by an awful sacrifice of life.  Joffre is not doing that.  If the Germans want to fling away their men by the tens of thousands—­let them.  In the end we gain by it.  We can rebuild a country; we cannot so easily re-create a race.  We mowed them down like a field of wheat, by the tens of thousands, and tens of thousands sprang into the gaps.  They advanced shoulder to shoulder.  Our guns could not miss them, but they were too many for us.  If you had seen that crossing I imagine it would have looked to you like a disaster for Germany.  It was so awful that it became comic.  I remember one point where a bridge was mined.  We let the first divisions of artillery and cavalry come right across on to our guns—­they were literally destroyed.  As the next division came on to the bridge—­up it went—­men, horses, guns dammed the flood, and the cavalry literally crossed on their own dead.  We are bold enough, but we are not so foolhardy as to throw away men like that.  They will be more useful to Joffre later.”

It was the word “comic” that did for me.  There was no sign in the fresh young face before me that the horror had left a mark.  If the thought came to him that every one of those tens of thousands whose bodies dammed and reddened the flood was dear to some one weeping in Germany, his eyes gave no sign of it.  Perhaps it was as well for the time being.  Who knows?