“By no means,” agreed the polite colonel, ready, moreover, I guessed, for any amount of talk in his native tongue.  He launched an epic episode.  “I was hit leading, in a charge, two battalions.  I need not have done that,” another shrug—­“but what will you?  It was snowing; it was going to be bad work; one could perhaps put courage into the men by being at their head.  It is often the duty of an officer to do more than, his duty—­n’est-ce-pas? So that I was hit in the right knee and the left shoulder par exemple, and fell about six yards from the German trenches.  A place unhealthy, and one sees I could not run away, being shot on the bias.  I shammed dead.  An alive French officer would have been too interesting in that scenery.  I assure m’sieur that the entr’actes are far too long in No Man’s Land.  I became more and more displeased with the management of that play as I lay, very badly amused with my wounds, and afraid to blink an eye, being a corpse.  The Huns demand a high state of immobility in corpses.  But I fell happily sidewise, and out of the extreme corner of the left eye I caught a glimpse of our sand-bags.  One blessed that twist, though it became enough ennuyant, and one would have given a year of good life to turn over.  Merely to turn over.  Am I fatiguing m’sieur?” the colonel broke in.

I prodded him back eagerly into his tale.

“M’sieur is amiable.  The long and short of it is that when it became dark my good lads began to try to rescue my body.  Four or five times that one-twentieth of eye saw a wriggling form work through sand-bags and start slowly, flat to the earth, toward me.  But the ground was snow-covered and the Germans saw too the dark uniform.  Each time a fusillade of shots broke out, and the moving figure dropped hastily behind the sand-bags.  And each time—­” the colonel stopped to light a cigarette, his face ruddy in the glare of the match.  “Each time I was—­disappointed.  I became disgusted with the management of that theatre, till at last the affair seemed beyond hope, and I had about determined to turn over and draw up my bad leg with my good hand for a bit of easement and be shot comfortably, when I was aware that the surface of the ground near by was heaving—­the white, snowy ground heaving.  I was close enough to madness between cold and pain, and I regarded the phenomenon as a dream.  But with that hands came out of the heaving ground, eyes gleamed.  A rope was lashed about my middle and I was drawn toward our trenches.”  The cigarette puffed vigorously at this point.  “M’sieur sees?”

I did not.

The colonel laughed.  “One of my Hurons had the inspiration to run to a farmhouse not far away and requisition a sheet.  He wrapped himself in it, head and all, and, being Indian, it was a bagatelle to him to crawl out on his stomach.  They were pleased enough, my good fellows, when they found they had got not only my body but also me in it.”