I stayed there all day.  In the evening the soldiers of the 101st took me into the woods, where there were several French wounded and a German Captain, wounded the evening before.  He was suffering too, poor wretch.  About midnight the French soldiers came to seek those who were transportable.  They left only my comrade, myself and the German Captain.  There were other wounded further along, and we heard their cries.  It was dreary.

These wounded men passed two whole days there without help.  On the third day the Germans arrived and the narrator gave himself up for lost.  But the German Captain, with whom the Frenchmen had divided their food and drink, begged that they be cared for.  Ultimately they were taken to the German camp and their wounds attended to.  But in a few minutes the camp became the centre of a violent attack, and again it looked as if the last day of the wounded prisoners had come.

Suddenly the Germans ran away and left everything.  An hour later, when the firing ceased, they returned, carried away the wounded of both nationalities on stretchers, crowded about twenty-five of them into one wagon (the narrator’s broken leg was not stretched out, and he suffered,) and all the way the wagon gave forth the odor of death.  All day they rode without a bite to eat.  At 1 o’clock at night they reached the village of Cuvergnon, where their wounds were well attended to.  The following day the Germans departed without saying a word, but the villagers cared for the wounded, both friends and enemies, and in time the American automobiles carried them to Neuilly.

It is a paradise [added the wounded man.] Now we are saved.  But what things I have seen!  I have seen an officer with his brain hanging here, over his eye.  And black corpses, and bloated horses!  The saddest time is the night.  One hears cries:  “Help!” There are some who call their mothers.  No one answers.

All these recitals of soldiers are stamped with the red badge of courage.  A priest serving as an Adjutant was superintending the digging of trenches close to the firing line on the Aisne.  He had to expose himself for a space of three feet in going from one trench to another.  In that instant a Mauser bullet struck him under the left eye, traversed the nostril, the top of the palate, the cheek bone and came out under the right ear.  He felt the bullet only where it came out, but soon he fell, covered with blood and believed he was wounded to death.  Then his courage returned, and he crawled into the trench.  Comrades carried him to the ambulance at Ambleny, with bullets and “saucepans” raining about them from every direction.  In time he was transferred to the American Hospital at Neuilly.  “I’m only a little disfigured and condemned to liquids,” he told his friend the abbe.  “In a few weeks I shall be cured and will return to the front.”