A middle-aged sergeant, who had a wound in the stomach and was sitting up in his bed, looked across.  “There was a line of Germans came upon us,” he said, “at Bras.  I thought I must be suffering from a nightmare when I saw them.  They had thrown away their rifles and had all joined hands.  They came dancing towards us just like a row of ballet girls.  They were shrieking and laughing, and they never attempted to do anything.  We just waited until they were close up and then shot them down.  It was like killing a lot of kids who had come to have a game with us.  The one I potted got his arms round me before he coughed himself out, calling me his ‘liebe Elsa,’ and wanting to kiss me.  Lord!  You can guess how the Boche ink-slingers spread themselves over that business:  ’Sonderbar!  Colossal!  Unvergessliche Helden.’  Poor devils!”

“They’ll give us ginger before it is over,” said another.  He had had both his lips torn away, and appeared to be always laughing.  “Stuff it into us as if we were horses at a fair.  That will make us run forward, right enough.”

“Oh, come,” struck in a youngster who was lying perfectly flat, face downwards on his bed:  it was the position in which he could breathe easiest.  He raised his head a couple of inches and twisted it round so as to get his mouth free.  “It isn’t as bad as all that.  Why, the Thirty-third swarmed into Fort Malmaison of their own accord, though ’twas like jumping into a boiling furnace, and held it for three days against pretty nearly a division.  There weren’t a dozen of them left when we relieved them.  They had no ammunition left.  They’d just been filling up the gaps with their bodies.  And they wouldn’t go back even then.  We had to drag them away.  ‘They shan’t pass,’ ’They shan’t pass!’—­that’s all they kept saying.”  His voice had sunk to a thin whisper.

A young officer was lying in a corner behind a screen.  He leant forward and pushed it aside.

“Oh, give the devil his due, you fellows,” he said.  “War isn’t a pretty game, but it does make for courage.  We all know that.  And things even finer than mere fighting pluck.  There was a man in my company, a Jacques Decrusy.  He was just a stupid peasant lad.  We were crowded into one end of the trench, about a score of us.  The rest of it had fallen in, and we couldn’t move.  And a bomb dropped into the middle of us; and the same instant that it touched the ground Decrusy threw himself flat down upon it and took the whole of it into his body.  There was nothing left of him but scraps.  But the rest of us got off.  Nobody had drugged him to do that.  There isn’t one of us who was in that trench that will not be a better man to the end of his days, remembering how Jacques Decrusy gave his life for ours.”