“I left by the little road from Vermelles on which the two hostile machines were reported to be approaching.  After twenty minutes I stopped, put out my lights, and waited.  A quarter of an hour of profound silence followed, and then I caught the sound of the first mitrailleuse.  With one spin of the wheel I threw my machine across the middle of the road.  That of the enemy struck us squarely in the centre.  The moment the shock was past I rose from my seat with my revolver and killed the chauffeur and the mechanician.

“But almost immediately the second machine gun arrived.  The two men on it comprehended what had happened.  While one of them stopped the machine, the other aimed at me under his seat and fired a revolver ball that pierced both thighs; then they turned their machine and retreated.  My companion, happily, was not hurt, so he could take me to Vermelles, where the ambulance service was.  The same evening they gave me the military medal, for which I had already been proposed three times.”

After three months of suffering, borne without complaint, this man died without having been able to get a word to his parents.  The abbe had become deeply attached to him, and the whole hospital corps felt the loss of his courageous presence.

Some of the horror of war is in these pages, as where the author says: 

     The doctors worked till 3 o’clock this morning.  They had to
     amputate arms and legs affected with gangrene.  The operating
     room was a sea of blood.

Some of the pathos of war is here, and even a little of its humor, but most of all its courage.  Both of the latter are mingled in the case of an English soldier who was brought in wounded from the field of Soissons.

     “I fought until such a day, when I was wounded.”

     “And since then?”

     “Since then I have traveled.”

An English infantry officer, a six-footer, brought to the hospital with his head bandaged in red rather than white, showed the abbe his cap and the bullet hole in it.

“A narrow escape,” said the abbe in English, and then learned that the escape was narrower than the wounded forehead indicated.  Another bullet, without touching the officer, had pierced the sole of his shoe under his foot, and a third had perforated his coat between the body and the arm without breaking the skin.

The author’s attitude toward the Germans, always free from bitterness, is sufficiently indicated in such a paragraph as this: