“I send this letter,” writes a young Zouave, “as I sit huddled under an earth-heap at twenty yards from a German trench, less to be envied than a rabbit in its burrow, because when the hunter is far away it can come out and feed at pleasure.  You who live through the same agonies, old friend, must learn and rejoice that I have been promoted adjutant on the night of November 13 on the banks of the Yser.  There were seventy men out of 250—­the rest of the company sleep for ever round that ferryman’s house which the papers have made famous...  What moral sufferings I have endured!  We have now been brought to the south of Ypres and continue this depressing life in advanced trenches.  Not a quarter of an hour’s respite:  shells, shrapnels, bombs and bullets fall around us continuously.  How courage has changed with this modern war!  The hero of olden times was of a special type, who put on a fine pose and played up to the gallery because he fought before admiring spectators.  Now, apart from our night attacks, always murderous, in which courage is not to be seen, because one can hardly discern one’s neighbour in the darkness, our valour consists in a perfect stoicism.  Just now I had a fellow killed before a loophole.  His comrades dragged him away, and with perfect quietude replaced the man who is eternally out of action.  Isn’t that courage?  Isn’t it courage to get the brains of one’s comrade full in the face, and then to stand on guard in the same place while suffering the extremes of cold and dampness? ...  On the night of the 13th I commanded a section of corpses which a mitrailleuse had raked.  I had the luck to escape, and I shouted to these poor devils to make a last assault.  Then I saw what had happened and found myself with a broken rifle and a uniform in rags and tatters.  My commandant spoke to me that night, and said:  ’You had better change those clothes.  You can put on an adjutant’s stripes.’”

One passage in this young Zouave’s letter reveals the full misery of the war to a Frenchman’s spirit:  “Our courage consists in a perfect stoicism.”  It is not the kind of courage which suits his temperament, and to sit in a trench for months, inactive, waiting for death under the rain of shells, is the worst ordeal to which the soul of the French soldier is asked to submit.  Yet he has submitted, and held firm, along lines of trenches, 500 miles from end to end, with a patience in endurance which no critics of France would have believed possible until the proof was given.  Above the parapet lie the corpses of comrades and of men who were his enemies until they became poor clay.