posts," one
of those common incidents of warfare that are never recorded--never
remembered save here and there by some sad face unnoticed in the crowd.
Four of the men were dead; one, a Frenchman was still alive, though
bleeding copiously from a deep wound in the chest that with a handful of
dank grass he was trying to staunch.

Ulrich raised him in his arms. The man spoke no German, and Ulrich
knew but his mother tongue; but when the man, turning towards the
neighbouring village with a look of terror in his half-glazed eyes,
pleaded with his hands, Ulrich understood, and lifting him gently
carried him further into the wood.

He found a small deserted shelter that had been made by
charcoal-burners, and there on a bed of grass and leaves Ulrich laid
him; and there for a week all but a day Ulrich tended him and nursed him
back to life, coming and going stealthily like a thief in the darkness.
Then Ulrich, who had thought his one desire in life to be to kill all
Frenchmen, put food and drink into the Frenchman's knapsack and guided
him half through the night and took his hand; and so they parted.

Ulrich did not return to Alt Waldnitz, that lies hidden in the forest
beside the murmuring Muhlde. They would think he had gone to the war;
he would let them think so. He was too great a coward to go back to them
and tell them that he no longer wanted to fight; that the sound of the
drum brought to him only the thought of trampled grass where dead men
lay with curses in their eyes.

So, with head bowed down in shame, to and fro about the moaning land,
Ulrich of the dreamy eyes came and went, guiding his solitary footsteps
by the sounds of sorrow, driving away the things of evil where they
crawled among the wounded, making his way swiftly to the side of pain,
heedless of the uniform.

Thus one day he found himself by chance near again to forest-girdled
Waldnitz. He would push his way across the hills, wander through its
quiet ways in the moonlight while the good folks all lay sleeping. His
foot-steps quickened as he drew nearer. Where the trees broke he would
be able to look down upon it, see every roof he knew so well--the
church, the mill, the winding Muhlde--the green, worn grey with dancing
feet, where, when the hateful war was over, would be heard again the
Saxon folk-songs.

Another was there, where the forest halts on the brow of the hill--a
figure kneeling on the ground with his face towards the village. Ulrich
sto