fire of the diminishing butt. For orderly, he had a
black fat Congo boy, in dark blue Belgian uniform, flat-nosed, with
wrinkles down the forehead. He was Gilson's man, never looking at him in
speaking, and using an open vowel dialect. Before one of the attacks, a
soldier came to Gilson with his wife's picture, watch, ring, and money,
and his home address.

"I'm not going to come out," said the soldier.

It happened so.

The Commandant's pockets were heavy with these mementoes of the
predestined--the letters of boys to their mothers. He had that
tenderness and agreeable sentiment which seem to go with bravery. He
filled his uniform with souvenirs of pleasant times, a china
slipper--our dinner favor to him--a roadside weed, a paper napkin from a
happy luncheon--a score or more little pieces of sentimental value. When
he went into dangerous action, he never ordered any one to follow him.
He called for volunteers, and was grieved that it was the lads of
sixteen and seventeen years that were always the first to offer.

We had grown to care for these men. From the first, soldiers of France
and Belgium had given us courtesy. In Paris, it was a soldier who stood
in line for me, and got the paper. It was a soldier who shared his food
and wine on the fourteen-hour trip from Paris to Dieppe--four hours in
peace days, fourteen hours in mobilization. It was a soldier who left
the car and found out the change of train and the hour--always a soldier
who did the helpful thing. It did not require war to create their
quality of friendliness and unselfish courtesy.

How could Red Cross work be impersonal? No one would go over to be shot
at on an impersonal errand of mercy. You risk yourself for individual
men, for men in whose cause you believe. Surely, the loyal brave German
women feel as we felt. Red Cross work is not only a service to suffering
flesh. It is work to remake a soldier, who will make right prevail. The
Red Cross worker is aiming her rifle at the enemy by every bandage she
ties on wounded Belgians. She is rebuilding the army. She is as
efficient and as deadly as the workman that makes the powder, the
chauffeur that drives it to the trench in transports, and the gunner
that shoots it into the hostile line. The mother does not extend her
motherliness to the destroyer of her family. There is no hater like the
mother when she faces that which violates her brood. The same mother
instinct makes you take care of your own, an