dy sewer, some little French soldiers come and go, eat and
sleep for months at a time. The dreadfulness of the sights, the stench
in the air, the tragic presence of death has not gripped their souls,
their courage or their nerves. They are no less confident and merry
than the others and, in the evening, when the setting sun adds the
purple of its shadows to the red of all the blood that has been shed
on the Butte, they sing from the depths of their charnel house sweet
love songs.... This is the most regally beautiful sight I have seen in
this war; it is the most splendidly moving example I know of what
personal sacrifice for one's country's sake can do.

One day, in a rest village in the neighborhood, I met a soldier from
one of the battalions which was encamped in the charnel house. He was
a boy twenty years old, who hurried along with a flower in his
buttonhole, whistling a tune.... He was so joyful that I asked him:

"You seem as happy as you can be."

"I have leave, Sir," he answered, "and in a week I shall go to the
country to see my mother. But, for the present, I have to go and take
the trench at Eparges...."

As he mentioned the name of the accursed Butte, I could not repress a
movement. He saw it and said:

"Sir, I am glad to go there."

And he told me his name and the number of his company. Then he hurried
away.

It chanced that precisely one week later I met one of his officers. I
asked him about the merry fellow.

"That man? He was killed the day before yesterday at Eparges."

And my comrade added in a low voice:

"He was shot down at my side, struck with a bullet square in the
chest. The death agony set in at once. As I was trying to do something
for him, passing my hand gently across his forehead, I said to him:

"Courage, my boy, courage."

He murmured the reply:

"Oh, I'm glad to die."

Glad ... the same phrase, the same words I had heard a week ago, which
can be heard everywhere on the French front--and they are glad to go
into all the trenches and into all the charnel houses, and it is with
a happy heart that they rest in peace.

* * * * *

But France has not only fought with all her courage, with all her
soul, with all her tenacity. She has fought with all her living
strength, with her men, her women, even her children.

What can I say which has not already been said about the men? When I
think of my own men, when I think of all the men floundering