radiant in the faith of his childhood,
bewailing his sins and kissing the crucifix like the French of the
Middle Ages. How many times, in the horrible frame of modern war, have
words been uttered, scenes enacted, agonies suffered which echoed the
most sublime passages of the _Chanson de Roland_!

[Sidenote: Most of the wounded recover.]

[Sidenote: Many times wounded.]

But, thank God, among those who fall without being killed outright, the
minority are mortally wounded. Most of them are destined to get well or
at least to survive: they know it, and are glad. As soon as they regain
consciousness after the shock, the first idea is: "Am I really not
dead?" To be wounded does not disconcert them at all. "We are here for
that!" said, the other day, one of my young friends of the class 1915,
who by exception has been preserved until now. The alternative, in this
present War, is not to come out of it wounded, or unwounded, but wounded
or dead: to escape death is all that one can reasonably ask. Men who
have only been wounded once, are more and more scarce, some have
returned to the front four or five times. We had at the hospital a year
ago an American sergeant of the Foreign Legion, engaged at Orleans in
August, 1914, who having fought in Champagne, on the Somme and in
Alsace, had received three wounds, the last at the end of 1915, at
Belloy-en-Santerre, when a German bomb had badly damaged his left thigh:
"the last" up to that time, for he had to go back under fire and will in
all probability receive a fourth wound.

[Sidenote: The slightly wounded are lucky.]

[Sidenote: The most unfortunate.]

Those slightly wounded have not much merit, it must be confessed, in
being resigned or even joyful. After a rapid dressing at the first
station they will rest several days at the hospital at the front, and
then get leave of convalescence which they will pass with their
families. A wound for them, who can bear a little suffering, means an
unexpected holiday and supplementary permission. They are only sorry if
they are hit stupidly, out of action or at the beginning of a
well-prepared attack, and prevented from going on with it. Let us leave
them to their good luck, and stay longer with the severely wounded,
those, for instance, who have a leg or arm broken, a fractured jaw,
vertebra or ribs bruised, or are deprived of one of their senses--blind,
deaf, paralyzed. We unhesitatingly acknowledge that these three last
categories o