Abbe Klein tells the curious story of a Zouave and his faithful dog.  In one of the zigzag corridors connecting the trenches near Arras the man was terribly wounded by a shell that killed all his companions and left him three-quarters buried in the earth.  With only the dead around him, he “felt himself going to discouragement,” to use the author’s mild phrase, when his dog, which had never left him since the beginning of the war, arrived and began showing every sign of distress and affection.  The wounded man told the author: 

It is not true that he dug me out, but he roused my courage.  I commenced to free my arms, my head, the rest of my body.  Seeing this, he began scratching-with all his might around me, and then caressed me, licking my wounds.  The lower part of my right leg was torn off, the left wounded in the calf, a piece of shell in the back, two fingers cut off, and the right arm burned.  I dragged myself bleeding to the trench, where I waited an hour for the litter carriers.  They brought me to the ambulance post at Roclincourt, where my foot was taken off, shoe and all; it hung only by a tendon.  From there I was carried on a stretcher to Anzin, then in a carriage to another ambulance post, where they carved me some more....  My dog was present at the first operation.  An hour after my departure he escaped and came to me at Anzin.

But when the Zouave was sent to Neuilly the two friends had to separate.  At the railway station he begged to take his dog along, and told his story; but the field officer, touched though he was, could not take it upon himself to send a dog on a military train.  The distress of both man and beast was so evident that more than one nurse had tears in her eyes as the train pulled out.

They tried to pet the dog, dubbed him Tue-Boches, offered him dog delicacies of all sorts, but in vain.  He refused all food and remained for two days “sad to death.”  Then some one went to the American Hospital, told how the dog had saved the Zouave, and the upshot of it was that the faithful animal, duly combed and passed through the disinfecting room, was admitted to the hospital and recovered his master and his appetite.  But at last accounts his master was still very weak, and “in the short visit which the dog is allowed to make each day, he knows perfectly, after a tender and discreet good morning, how to hold himself very wisely at the foot of the bed, his eyes fixed upon his patient.”

Thanks to modern science, the cases of tetanus are few in this war, but there are many deaths from gangrene, because, with no truce for the removal of the wounded, so many lie for days before receiving medical aid.  Abbe Klein tells of one Breton boy, as gentle a soul as his sister—­“my little Breton,” he always calls him, affectionately—­and comments again and again upon the boy’s patient courage amid sufferings that could have but one end.  The infection spread in spite of all that science could do, and even amputation could not save him.  At last he ceased to live, “like a poor little bird,” as his French attendant, herself a mother with three boys in the army, said with tears.