apoplectic with rage, who fired two revolver shots in our
direction. The man who had first organized the defence of the trench
--the hero of that "Arise, ye dead!"--received a shot full in the throat
and fell. But the man who held the bayonet and who had dragged
himself from corpse to corpse, staggered up at four feet from the
sand-bags, missed death from two shots, and plunged his weapon
into the German's throat. The position was saved, and it was as
though the dead had really risen.

15

The French soldier, as I have said, is strangely candid in the analysis
of his emotions, and is not ashamed of confessing his fears. I
remember a young lieutenant of Dragoons who told me of the terror
which took possession of him when the enemy's shrapnel first burst
above his head.

"As every shell came whizzing past, and then burst, I ducked my
head and wondered whether it was this shell which was going to kill
me, or the next. The shrapnel bullets came singing along with a 'Tue!
Tue!' Ah, that is a bad song! But most of all I feared the rifle-shots of
an infantry attack. I could not help glancing sideways at the sound of
that 'Zip! zip! zip!' There was something menacing and deadly in it,
and one cannot dodge the death which comes with one of these little
bullets. It is horrible!"

And yet this man, who had an abscess in his leg after riding for weeks
in his saddle and who had fought every day and nearly every night for
a fortnight, was distressed because he had to retire from his
squadron for awhile until his leg healed. In five days at the most he
would go back again to hell--hating the horror of it all, fearing those
screeching shells and hissing bullets, yet preferring to die for France
rather than remain alive and inactive when his comrades were
fighting.

Imagine the life of one of these cavalrymen, as I heard it described by
many of them in the beginning of the war.

They were sent forward on a reconnaissance--a patrol of six or eight.
The enemy was known to be in the neighbourhood. It was necessary
to get into touch with him, to discover his strength, to kill some of his
outposts, and then to fall back to the division of cavalry and report the
facts. Not an easy task! It quite often happened that only one man
out of six came back to tell the tale, surprised at his own luck. The
German scouts had clever tricks.

One day near Bethune they played one of them--a favourite one. A
friend of mine led six of his drago