a complicated, delicate marvel!

Corporal Leglise is in bed now. He breathes with difficulty, and catches
his breath now and again like a person who has been sobbing. He looks
about him languidly, and hardly seems to have made up his mind to live.
He contemplates the bottle of serum, the tubes, the needles, all the
apparatus set in motion to revive his fluttering heart, and he seems
bowed down by grief. He wants something to drink, but he must not have
anything yet; he wants to sleep, but we have to deny sleep to those who
need it most; he wants to die perhaps, and we will not let him.

He sees again the listening post where he spent the night, in advance of
all his comrades. He sees again the narrow doorway bordered by sandbags
through which he came out at dawn to breathe the cold air and look at
the sky from the bottom of the communication-trench. All was quiet, and
the early summer morning was sweet even in the depths of the trench.
But some one was watching and listening for the faint sound of his
footsteps. An invisible hand hurled a bomb. He rushed back to the door;
but his pack was on his back, and he was caught in the aperture like
a rat in a trap. The air was rent by the detonation, and his legs
were rent, like the pure air, like the summer morning, like the lovely
silence.

The days pass, and once more, the coursing blood begins to make the
vessels of the neck throb, to tinge the lips, and give depth and
brilliance to the eye.

Death, which had overrun the whole body like an invader, retired,
yielding ground by degrees; but it has halted now, and makes a stand at
the legs; these it will not relinquish; it demands something by way of
spoil; it will not be baulked of its prey entirely.

We fight for the portion Death has chosen. The wounded Corporal looks on
at our labours and our efforts, like a poor man who has placed his cause
in the hands of a knight, and who can only be a spectator of the combat,
can only pray and wait.

We shall have to give the monster a share; one of the legs must go. Now
another struggle begins with the man himself. Several times a day I go
and sit by his bed. All our attempts at conversation break down one by
one. We always end in the same silence and anxiety. To-day Leglise said
to me:

"Oh! I know quite well what you're thinking about!"

As I made no answer, he intreated:

"Perhaps we could wait a little longer? Perhaps to-morrow I may be
better..."

Then suddenly, in g