man. But _marins_ are
not weighted down by equipment nor muffled with clothing. They go
bobbing like corks, as though they would always stay on the crest of
things. And riding on top of their lightness is that absurd bright-red
button in their cap. The armies for five hundred miles are sober,
grown-up people, but here are the play-boys of the western front.

From Ghent they trooped south to Dixmude, and were shot to pieces in
that "Thermopylae of the North."

"Hold for four days," was their order.

They held for three weeks, till the sea came down and took charge.
During those three weeks we motored in and out to get their wounded.
Nothing of orderly impression of those days remains to me. I have only
flashes of the sailor-soldiers curved over and snaking along the
battered streets behind slivers of wall, handfuls of them in the Hotel
de Ville standing around waiting in a roar of noise and a bright blaze
of burning houses--waiting till the shelling fades away.[C]

Then for over twelve months they held wrecked Nieuport, and I have
watched them there week after week. There is no drearier post on earth.
One day in the pile of masonry thirty feet from our cellar refuge the
sailors began throwing out the bricks, and in a few minutes they
uncovered the body of a comrade. All the village has the smell of
desolation. That smell is compounded of green ditch-water, damp plaster,
wet clothing, blood, straw, and antiseptics. The nose took it as we
crossed the canal, and held it till we shook ourselves on the run home.
Thirty minutes a day in that soggy wreck pulled at my spirits for hours
afterward. But those chaps stood up to it for twenty-four hours a day,
lifting a cheery face from a stinking cellar, hopping about in the
tangle, sleeping quietly when their "night off" comes. As our chauffeur
drew his camera, one of them sprang into a bush entanglement, aimed his
rifle, and posed.

I recollect an afternoon when we had word of an attack. We were grave,
because the Germans are strong and fearless.

"Are they coming?" grinned a sailor. "Let them come. We are ready."

We learned to know many of the Fusiliers Marins and to grow fond of
them. How else could it be when we went and got them, sick and wounded,
dying and dead, two, six, ten of them a day, for many weeks, and brought
them in to the Red Cross post for a dressing, and then on to the
hospital? I remember a young man in our ambulance. His right foot was
shot away, and