“You ran across to our lines?”

“But not exactly.  One sees that I was yet in dirty German prison clothes, and looked like an infantryman of the Boches, so that a poilu rushed at me with a bayonet.  I believed, then, that I had come upon a German patrol.  Each thought the other a Hun.  I managed to wrest from the poilu his rifle with the bayonet, but as we fought another shot me—­in the side.”

“You were wounded?”

“Yes, my colonel.”

“In hospital?”

“Yes, my colonel.”

“How long?”

“Three months, my colonel.”

“Why are you not again in the army?”

The face of the erect soldier, Hirondelle, the dare-devil, was suddenly the face of a man grown old, ill, and broken-hearted.  He stared at the stalwart French officer, gathering himself with an effort.  “I—­was discharged, my colonel, as—­unfit.”  His head in its old felt hat dropped into his hands suddenly, and he broke beyond control into sobs that shook not only him but every man there.

The colonel stepped forward and put an arm around the bent shoulders. “Mon heros!” said the colonel.

With that Rafael found words, never a hard task for him.  Yet they came with gasps between.  “To be cast out as an old horse—­at the moment of glory!  I had dreamed all my life—­of fighting.  And I had it—­oh, my colonel—­I had it!  The glory came when I was old and knew how to be happy in it.  Not as a boy who laughs and takes all as his right.  I was old, yes, but I was good to kill the vermin.  I avenged the children and the women whom those savages—­My people, the savages of the wood, knew no better, yet they have not done things as bad as these vile ones who were educated, who knew.  Therefore I killed them.  I was old, but I was strong, my colonel knows.  Not for nothing have I lived a hard life. On a vu de la misere.  I have hunted moose and bear and kept my muscles of steel and my eyes of a hawk.  It is in my blood to be a fighting man.  I fought with pleasure, and I was troubled with no fear.  I was old, but I could have killed many devils more.  And so I was shot down by my own friend after seven days of hard life.  And the young soldier doctor discharged me as unfit to fight.  And so I am come home very fast to hide myself, for I am ashamed.  I am finished.  The fighting and the glory are for me no more.”

The colonel stepped back a bit and his face flamed.  “Glory!” he whispered.  “Glory no more for the Hirondelle?  What of the Croix de Guerre?”

Rafael shook his head.  “I haf heard my colonel who said they would have given me—­me, the Hirondelle—­the war cross.  That now is lost too.”

“Lost!” The colonel’s deep tone was full of the vibration which only a French voice carries.  With a quick movement he unfastened the catch that held the green ribbon, red-striped, of his own cross of war.  He turned and pinned the thing which men die for on the shabby coat of the guide.  Then he kissed him on either cheek.  “My comrade,” he said, “your glory will never be old.”