f wounded feel their misery profoundly, and need time to get
used to it. Those, happily much more numerous, who have only temporarily
or permanently lost the use of one of their limbs, generally consider
themselves very fortunate. "I have the good wound!" they affect to say,
meaning that the War is over for them. So at least they express
themselves, not at all wishing to be admired, and trying as it were, to
minimize their courage in bearing their trial.

[Sidenote: Self-sacrifice of the wounded.]

[Sidenote: "Arise, ye dead!"]

But aside from this paradoxical attitude, they frequently speak and act
in the most simple, touching way! It is common to hear one say to the
stretcher-bearer who comes to fetch him: "Take my comrade here first; he
is much more wounded than I; I can wait...." And that when it means
lying on the ground under the bombardment, thirsty, feverish, feeling
his strength ebb with his blood. Before any one comes back to get him,
often he will try again, if he has a sound arm left, to fire his rifle
or his machine-gun once more. Glory surrounds the epic incident of the
trench where the only unwounded soldier, seeing the enemy arrive, cried
out as if in delirium: "Arise, ye dead!" and the dying really rose, and
succeeded, some of them, in firing once more before they fell again, and
the assailants fled. A more recent and simpler deed is also worth
recording.

[Sidenote: A dead observer protects his pilot.]

Returning from a bombardment of the enemy's factories in broad daylight,
a French machine conducted by two men was attacked by several aviators.
The observer, hit by a ball in the chest, dropped down into the
_carlingue_. The pilot seeing this prepared to turn back. But hearing
his machine-gun firing again, he concluded that the observer was not
seriously hurt. As soon as he landed in France: "Well, what about that
wound?" he asked. No answer. He bent down and saw that his companion was
dead. Even in his agony he had continued to protect his comrade.

In the beginning of the War the wounded stayed a long, a very long time
without being rescued, at the place where they fell, or in the shelter
to which they had been able to crawl. Our stretcher-bearers of the
American Ambulance found, after the battle of the Marne, many who had
lain for days and nights in shell holes, at the foot of trees, in
ruined barns or churches! One may guess what the mortality might be!
Today, happily, it is no longer so. The