He got on his knees, and began to fling his bombs into the crowd of Germans.  At his call, the other wounded men struggled up.  Two with broken legs grasped their rifle and opened fire.  The hero with his left arm hanging limp, grabbed a bayonet.  When I stood up, with all my senses about me now, some of the Germans were wounded and others were scrambling out of the trench in a panic.  But with his back to the sand-bags stayed a German Unter-offizier, enormous, sweating, apoplectic with rage, who fired two revolver shots in our direction.  The man who had first organized the defence of the trench —­the hero of that “Arise, ye dead!”—­received a shot full in the throat and fell.  But the man who held the bayonet and who had dragged himself from corpse to corpse, staggered up at four feet from the sand-bags, missed death from two shots, and plunged his weapon into the German’s throat.  The position was saved, and it was as though the dead had really risen.

15

The French soldier, as I have said, is strangely candid in the analysis of his emotions, and is not ashamed of confessing his fears.  I remember a young lieutenant of Dragoons who told me of the terror which took possession of him when the enemy’s shrapnel first burst above his head.

“As every shell came whizzing past, and then burst, I ducked my head and wondered whether it was this shell which was going to kill me, or the next.  The shrapnel bullets came singing along with a ’Tue!  Tue!’ Ah, that is a bad song!  But most of all I feared the rifle-shots of an infantry attack.  I could not help glancing sideways at the sound of that ‘Zip! zip! zip!’ There was something menacing and deadly in it, and one cannot dodge the death which comes with one of these little bullets.  It is horrible!”

And yet this man, who had an abscess in his leg after riding for weeks in his saddle and who had fought every day and nearly every night for a fortnight, was distressed because he had to retire from his squadron for awhile until his leg healed.  In five days at the most he would go back again to hell—­hating the horror of it all, fearing those screeching shells and hissing bullets, yet preferring to die for France rather than remain alive and inactive when his comrades were fighting.

Imagine the life of one of these cavalrymen, as I heard it described by many of them in the beginning of the war.

They were sent forward on a reconnaissance—­a patrol of six or eight.  The enemy was known to be in the neighbourhood.  It was necessary to get into touch with him, to discover his strength, to kill some of his outposts, and then to fall back to the division of cavalry and report the facts.  Not an easy task!  It quite often happened that only one man out of six came back to tell the tale, surprised at his own luck.  The German scouts had clever tricks.