d meet them with
a Pugeot of twenty-five or thirty horse power--I was
automobilist in the Thirtieth Dragoons.

"I left by the little road from Vermelles on which the two
hostile machines were reported to be approaching. After twenty
minutes I stopped, put out my lights, and waited. A quarter of
an hour of profound silence followed, and then I caught the
sound of the first mitrailleuse. With one spin of the wheel I
threw my machine across the middle of the road. That of the
enemy struck us squarely in the centre. The moment the shock
was past I rose from my seat with my revolver and killed the
chauffeur and the mechanician.

"But almost immediately the second machine gun arrived. The
two men on it comprehended what had happened. While one of
them stopped the machine, the other aimed at me under his seat
and fired a revolver ball that pierced both thighs; then they
turned their machine and retreated. My companion, happily, was
not hurt, so he could take me to Vermelles, where the
ambulance service was. The same evening they gave me the
military medal, for which I had already been proposed three
times."

After three months of suffering, borne without complaint, this man died
without having been able to get a word to his parents. The abbe had
become deeply attached to him, and the whole hospital corps felt the
loss of his courageous presence.

Some of the horror of war is in these pages, as where the author says:

The doctors worked till 3 o'clock this morning. They had to
amputate arms and legs affected with gangrene. The operating
room was a sea of blood.

Some of the pathos of war is here, and even a little of its humor, but
most of all its courage. Both of the latter are mingled in the case of
an English soldier who was brought in wounded from the field of
Soissons.

"I fought until such a day, when I was wounded."

"And since then?"

"Since then I have traveled."

An English infantry officer, a six-footer, brought to the hospital with
his head bandaged in red rather than white, showed the abbe his cap and
the bullet hole in it.

"A narrow escape," said the abbe in English, and then learned that the
escape was narrower than the wounded forehead indicated. Another bullet,
without touching the officer, had pierced the sole of his shoe under his
foot, and a third had perforated h