on all those prostrate men, making their faces look very white. He
heard the murmurs of voices about him, and the groans of the dying,
rising to hideous anguish as men were tortured by ghastly wounds
and broken limbs. In that night enmity was forgotten by those who
had fought like beasts and now lay together. A French soldier gave
his water-bottle to a German officer who was crying out with thirst.
The German sipped a little and then kissed the hand of the man who
had been his enemy. "There will be no war on the other side," he
said.

Another Frenchman--who came from Montmartre--found lying within
a yard of him a Luxembourgeois whom he had known as his
chasseur in a big hotel in Paris. The young German wept to see his
old acquaintance. "It is stupid," he said, "this war. You and I were
happy when we were good friends in Paris. Why should we have
been made to fight with each other?" He died with his arms round the
neck of the soldier who told me the story, unashamed of his own
tears.

Round this man's neck also were clasped the arms of a German
officer when a week previously the French piou-piou went across the
field of a battle--one of the innumerable skirmishes--which had been
fought and won four days before another French retirement. The
young German had had both legs broken by a shell, and was
wounded in other places. He had strength enough to groan piteously,
but when my friend lifted him up death was near to him.

"He was all rotten," said the soldier, "and there came such a terrible
stench from him that I nearly dropped him, and vomited as I carried
him along."

I learnt something of the psychology of the French soldier from this
young infantryman with whom I travelled in a train full of wounded
soon after that night in Lorraine, when the moon had looked down on
the field of the dead and dying in which he lay with a broken leg. He
had passed through a great ordeal, so that his nerves were still torn
and quivering, and I think he was afraid of going mad at the memory
of the things he had seen and suffered, because he tried to compel
himself to talk of trivial things, such as the beauty of the flowers
growing on the railway banks and the different badges on English
uniforms. But suddenly he would go back to the tale of his fighting in
Lorraine and resume a long and rapid monologue in which little
pictures of horror flashed after each other as though his brain were a
cinematograph recording some melodrama. Quee