the wounded had cut their sleeves in order to avoid the cruel friction
on their shattered arms, others still showed on their trousers the rents
made by the devastating shells.

They were fighters of all ranks and of many races--infantry, cavalry,
artillerymen; soldiers from the metropolis and from the colonies; French
farmers and African sharpshooters; red heads, faces of Mohammedan olive
and the black countenances of the Sengalese, with eyes of fire, and
thick, bluish blubber lips; some showing the good-nature and sedentary
obesity of the middle-class man suddenly converted into a warrior;
others sinewy, alert, with the aggressive profile of men born to fight,
and experienced in foreign fields.

The city, formerly visited by the hopeful, Catholic sick, was now
invaded by a crowd no less dolorous but clad in carnival colors. All,
in spite of their physical distress, had a certain air of good cheer and
satisfaction. They had seen Death very near, slipping out from his bony
claws into a new joy and zest in life. With their cloaks adorned with
medals, their theatrical Moorish garments, their kepis and their African
headdresses, this heroic band presented, nevertheless, a lamentable
aspect.

Very few still preserved the noble vertical carriage, the pride of
the superior human being. They were walking along bent almost double,
limping, dragging themselves forward by the help of a staff or friendly
arm. Others had to let themselves be pushed along, stretched out on the
hand-carts which had so often conducted the devout sick from the station
to the Grotto of the Virgin. Some were feeling their way along, blindly,
leaning on a child or nurse. The first encounters in Belgium and in
the East, a mere half-dozen battles, had been enough to produce these
physical wrecks still showing a manly nobility in spite of the most
horrible outrages. These organisms, struggling so tenaciously to regain
their hold on life, bringing their reviving energies out into the
sunlight, represented but the most minute part of the number mowed down
by the scythe of Death. Back of them were thousands and thousands of
comrades groaning on hospital beds from which they would probably never
rise. Thousands and thousands were hidden forever in the bosom of the
Earth moistened by their death agony--fatal land which, upon receiving a
hail of projectiles, brought forth a harvest of bristling crosses!

War now showed itself to Desnoyers with all its cruel hi