The French soldier has something in his blood and strain which uplifts him as a fighting man, and gives him the quality of chivalry.  Peasant or bourgeois or of patrician stock he has always the fine manners of a gentleman, and to know him in the field is to love the humour and temper of the man.

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Yet there were some men in the French army, as in our own, who showed how thin is the veneer which hides the civilized being from the primitive savage, to whom there is a joy in killing, like the wild animal who hunts his prey in the jungles and desert places.  One such man comes to my mind now.  He was in the advanced lines near Albert, but was always restless in the trench.  As soon as darkness came he would creep out and crawl on his belly across the swampy ground to a deep hole dug by the explosion of a marmite quite close to the German lines.  Here he found a hiding-place from which he could take “pot shots” at any German soldiers who under cover of darkness left their burrows to drag in the bodies of their comrades or to gather bits of wood with which to make a floor to their trenches.  They were quite unconscious of that man in the hole staring down the length of his rifle, and listening intently for any sound which would betray an enemy.  Every night he shot two or three men, perfectly patient in his long cold vigil if he could have that “luck.”  Then at dawn he would crawl back again, bringing a helmet or two with him, a cartridge belt or some other trophy as a sign of his success.

One night he shot a man who had stumbled quite close to his pit, and some great instinct of pity for his victim stirred in him, so that he risked a double journey over the open ground to fetch a spade with which he buried the man.  But soon afterwards he added to his “bag” of human life.  In his own trench he spoke very little and always seemed to be waiting for the hour when he could crawl out again like a Red Indian in search of scalps.  He was the primitive man, living like one of his ancestors of the Stone Age, except for the fire-stick with which he was armed and the knowledge of the arts and beauties of modern life in his hunter’s head.  For he was not a French Canadian from the backwoods, or an Alpine chasseur from lonely mountains, but a well-known lawyer from a French provincial town, with the blood and education of a gentleman.  As a queer character this man is worth remembering by those who study the psychology of war, but he is not typical of the soldiers of France, who in the mass have no blood-lust, and hate butchering their fellow beings, except in their moments of mad excitement, made up of fear as well as of rage, when to the shout of “En avant!” they leap out of the trenches and charge a body of Germans, stabbing and slashing with their bayonets, clubbing men to death with the butt-ends of their rifles, and for a few minutes of devilish intoxication, with the smell of blood in their nostrils, and with bloodshot eyes, rejoicing in slaughter.