at coat and circled a muscular
throat; his gray socks were pulled country-wise outside of the legs of
his blue trousers. He had an honest, pleasant face; there was a certain
simple, wholesome quality about the man. In the piping times of peace,
he was a cultivateur in the Valois, working his own little farm; he was
married and had two little boys. At Douaumont, a fragment of a shell had
torn open his left hand.

"The Boches are not going to get through up there?"

"Not now. As long as we hold the heights, Verdun is safe." His simple
French, innocent of argot, had a good country twang. "But oh, the people
killed! Comme il y a des gens tues!" He pronounced the final s of the
word gens in the manner of the Valois.

"Ca s'accroche aux arbres," he continued.

The vagueness of the ca had a dreadful quality in it that made you see
trees and mangled bodies. "We had to hold the crest of Douaumont under a
terrible fire, and clear the craters on the slope when the Germans tried
to fortify them. Our 'seventy-fives' dropped shells into the big craters
as I would drop stones into a pond. Pauvres gens!"

The phrase had an earth-wide sympathy in it, a feeling that the
translation "poor folks" does not render. He had taken part in a strange
incident. There had been a terrible corps-a-corps in one of the craters
which had culminated in a victory for the French; but the lieutenant of
his company had left a kinsman behind with the dead and wounded. Two
nights later, the officer and the sergeant crawled down the dreadful
slope to the crater where the combat had taken place, in the hope of
finding the wounded man. They could hear faint cries and moans from the
crater before they got to it. The light of a pocket flash-lamp showed
them a mass of dead and wounded on the floor of the crater--"un tas de
mourants et de cadavres," as he expressed it.

After a short search, they found the man for whom they were looking; he
was still alive but unconscious. They were dragging him out when a
German, hideously wounded, begged them to kill him.

"Moi, je n'ai plus jambes," he repeated in French; "pitie, tuez-moi."

He managed to make the lieutenant see that if he went away and left
them, they would all die in the agonies of thirst and open wounds. A
little flickering life still lingered in a few; there were vague rales
in the darkness. A rafale of shells fell on the slope; the violet glares
outlined the mouth of the crater.

"Ferme tes yeux" (s