ldiers
killed by the enemy to their families--their widows, their orphans, or,
if they are not married, to their old parents. During these years filled
with emotion, few spectacles have impressed me so deeply as the ceremony
of "taking arms" in the court of honor of the Invalides, when in this
historic monument, built by Louis XIV. and now the tomb of Napoleon, a
General of the Third Republic gave the emblem of the brave to women and
children dressed in mourning, at the same time as to rough soldiers
newly healed of their wounds and ready to return to the front.

[Sidenote: The return to the front.]

[Sidenote: Often impatient to rejoin his comrades.]

Return to the front!... This is the almost invariable ending of the
history of our wounded soldier of the fourth year of the War. Return to
the front! Never will the heroism required for the acceptance of such a
duty be sufficiently admired! After three years of fatigue, privations,
of unheard-of dangers, after one or several wounds which brought him
within an inch of death, this man who has for long months felt the
sweetness, the care, the calm of a comfortable hospital; has had a taste
of the charms of family life once more; has little by little turned his
thought away from the horrors of war, now he is sent back, to the depot,
from which he knows that before long he will be called again to the
front! And he submits, resigns himself: what do I say? Often impatient
of inaction, of the little rules which annoy his independent temper, he
asks to go in advance of the call, to rejoin as a volunteer and without
further delay his comrades of Champagne, Lorraine, Flanders or Picardy.
He reenters his regiment as the traveler reenters his own country, and
his only sadness is to find that during his absence so many old comrades
have fallen, so many newcomers have filled the gaps. But the welcome of
the survivors warms his heart.

[Sidenote: He goes into the trenches at night.]

Although it is night--for only at night do they go into the
trenches--the sky is ploughed with illuminating fireworks, with
projections and projectiles, of various kinds which bursting sow quick
flashes of light, and a death often as prompt. In a maze of narrow and
complicated paths our friend advances without knowing where and feeling
his way: nearer and nearer he approaches to enemies whose sleepless hate
growls menacingly below his feet in the ground, around him on the earth,
above him in the sky fi