As I have said before, we became very well acquainted with many of the wounded men at our hospital.  With some, indeed, we contracted strong friendships.  We buried many by subscription, thus rescuing them from the fosse commune to which soldiers, French or German, were as a rule consigned within the French lines.  Among others was a fair-haired Saxon by the name of Bruno, almost a boy in years, who was brought in from Champigny.  He won our hearts from the very first by asking that a suffering Frenchman who lay beside him might have his wounds dressed before his own.  He was dangerously and painfully wounded himself, yet no one ever heard him complain.  I shall never hear the “Wacht am Rhein” without thinking of him, for he was the first one that I ever heard sing it.  He sang it to me one night in return for some old German songs I had tried to cheer him with; that is, he sang some of it:  his voice was so feeble that I had to stop him.  He seemed to expect death, and was prepared for it.  His long, wavy blonde hair and his beardless boy face were always beautiful, but imagine them when his blue eyes were lit up by the sentiment of that song!

The next night, when I came to visit Bruno, a French National Guard was dying not far from him, with wife and family kneeling around the bed.  The tent was hushed, and I hesitated a moment at the door.  One or two American ladies, volunteer nurses of the ambulance, were grouped near the dying man back of the family.  Suddenly, Lisette, an Alsatian nurse who worked devotedly night and day for friend or foe alike, and who in her neat white cap had been standing in a corner wiping her eyes, approached me and said in her broad German French, "Partonn, but I will pray for this poor unfortunate.”  And she dropped on her knees beside the bed and commenced aloud in German a simple, earnest, honest prayer to which the scene and the language gave an effect utterly indescribable.  There were few dry eyes in the tent.  Soon after that I could tell by the movements about the bed that the poor National Guard was dead.  I turned to the bedside of the wounded Saxon, and found his hands clasped upon his breast and his lips muttering a prayer for his enemy.

It was near Christmas then, and to cheer Bruno after the foregoing scene I spoke to him of the merry Christmas-times in the Fatherland.  He shook his head mournfully:  “Ach Gott! die werd’ ich nie wiedersehen” ("I shall never see them again").  The only thing which he seemed very much to regret was that he should not live long enough to get the cross he had won, so that it might be sent to his father at his little village on the Elbe.  Well, the next afternoon we were gathered in the same mournful and hushed way about his bedside.  The dying Saxon alone broke the silence.  There is no way of reproducing in English the wonderful pathos of his speech, mellow even in its faintness.  I suppose I ought to say that his mind was wandering, but at the time it did not seem so to me.  He spoke first of the green fields approaching his native village, then of the flowers; and then finally he exclaimed, “There gleams the Elbe, and there comes father!—­Father!” And in the joy of that meeting, real or imaginary, a smile parting his lips, he died.