ly opened, and in the middle of the breast a bloody
wound was found. The balls still constantly whizzed around us; one
struck the doctor's helmet, and immediately I felt a violent blow on the
left arm. Another wound! With difficulty I was turned round, to look for
the outlet of the bullet; but it was still in my body, near the spine.
At last it was cut out. They were going away--'The wound in the arm,
doctor.' This, fortunately, was looked for in vain; the ball had merely
caused a blue spot and had sunk harmlessly into the ground.

"I extended my hand to the doctor and thanked him, as also the
attendant, whom I commissioned to ask the sergeant to send word to my
family. The doctor had carefully placed my cloak over me, with my helmet
firmly on my head, in order in some measure to protect me from the
leaden hail.

"Thus I lay alone with my own thoughts amid the most terrible fire
for perhaps an hour and a half. All my thoughts, as far as pain and
increasing weakness allowed, were fixed on my family. Gradually I got
accustomed to the danger which surrounded me, and only when too much
sand from the striking bullets was thrown on my body did I remember
my little enviable position. At last, after long, long waiting, the
sanitary detachment came for me."

THE REAL TRAGEDY OF WAR

It is not a pleasant picture--this story of the French soldier. It has
little in it of the grandeur, the beat of drums, the sound of martial
music, which is supposed to accompany war. The tread of marching feet
has died away, the excitement is gone, and man the demon is supplanted
by man the everyday human creature of suffering and home folks and fear.

It is only a personal account of an individual experience, yet in it may
be found the real significance and the real tragedy of war; for, after
the fighting is over, after the intoxication of legalized murder has
gone, after nations turn their attention from victories to men, it is
the aggregate of individual experiences which counts the costs of war.

Thousands of German, French, Belgian, Austrian, Russian, and British men
in the prime of life have been miserably slain and lie in obscure graves
of which the enemy now is the guardian, while others writhe in the
agony of lingering wounds or sullenly brood over their fate in the dull
routine of military prisons. In every part of the warring countries
mothers weep over the sons they shall see no more, and wives over the
husbands snatched from them