sang it to me one night in return for some old
German songs I had tried to cheer him with; that is, he sang some
of it: his voice was so feeble that I had to stop him. He seemed to
expect death, and was prepared for it. His long, wavy blonde hair and
his beardless boy face were always beautiful, but imagine them when
his blue eyes were lit up by the sentiment of that song!

The next night, when I came to visit Bruno, a French National Guard
was dying not far from him, with wife and family kneeling around the
bed. The tent was hushed, and I hesitated a moment at the door. One or
two American ladies, volunteer nurses of the ambulance, were grouped
near the dying man back of the family. Suddenly, Lisette, an Alsatian
nurse who worked devotedly night and day for friend or foe alike, and
who in her neat white cap had been standing in a corner wiping her
eyes, approached me and said in her broad German French, _"Partonn_,
but I will pray for this poor unfortunate." And she dropped on her
knees beside the bed and commenced aloud in German a simple, earnest,
honest prayer to which the scene and the language gave an effect
utterly indescribable. There were few dry eyes in the tent. Soon
after that I could tell by the movements about the bed that the poor
National Guard was dead. I turned to the bedside of the wounded Saxon,
and found his hands clasped upon his breast and his lips muttering a
prayer for his enemy.

It was near Christmas then, and to cheer Bruno after the foregoing
scene I spoke to him of the merry Christmas-times in the Fatherland.
He shook his head mournfully: "Ach Gott! die werd' ich nie
wiedersehen" ("I shall never see them again"). The only thing which he
seemed very much to regret was that he should not live long enough to
get the cross he had won, so that it might be sent to his father
at his little village on the Elbe. Well, the next afternoon we were
gathered in the same mournful and hushed way about his bedside. The
dying Saxon alone broke the silence. There is no way of reproducing
in English the wonderful pathos of his speech, mellow even in its
faintness. I suppose I ought to say that his mind was wandering, but
at the time it did not seem so to me. He spoke first of the green
fields approaching his native village, then of the flowers; and
then finally he exclaimed, "There gleams the Elbe, and there comes
father!--Father!" And in the joy of that meeting, real or imaginary, a
smile parting his lips,