he
driving rain, and at night wet straw or a water pool in a trench is not a
pleasant kind of bed.

"War," said one of the French officers with whom I have chatted, "is
not only fighting, as some people seem to think. The physical
discomforts are more dangerous to one's health than shrapnel. And it
is--par exemple--the impossibility of changing one's linen for weeks
and weeks which saps one's moral fibre more than the risk of losing
one's head."

The risk of death is taken lightly by all these men. It is curious, indeed,
that almost every French soldier has a conviction that he will die in
battle sooner or later. In moments of imagination he sees his own
corpse lying out in the field, and is full of pity for his wife and
children. But it does not destroy his courage or his gift of gaiety
or his desire to fight for France or his sublime endurance of pain.

The wounded men who pour down from the battlefields are incredibly
patient. I have seen them stand on a wounded leg to give their places
in a railway-carriage to peasant women with their babies. They have
used their bandaged hands to lift up the baskets of refugees. They
forget their wounds in remembering their adventures, and the simple
soldier describes his combats with a vivid eloquence not to be
attained by the British Tommy, who has no gift of words.

The French soldier has something in his blood and strain which uplifts
him as a fighting man, and gives him the quality of chivalry. Peasant
or bourgeois or of patrician stock he has always the fine manners of a
gentleman, and to know him in the field is to love the humour and
temper of the man.

17

Yet there were some men in the French army, as in our own, who
showed how thin is the veneer which hides the civilized being from
the primitive savage, to whom there is a joy in killing, like the wild
animal who hunts his prey in the jungles and desert places. One such
man comes to my mind now. He was in the advanced lines near
Albert, but was always restless in the trench. As soon as darkness
came he would creep out and crawl on his belly across the swampy
ground to a deep hole dug by the explosion of a marmite quite close
to the German lines. Here he found a hiding-place from which he
could take "pot shots" at any German soldiers who under cover of
darkness left their burrows to drag in the bodies of their comrades or
to gather bits of wood with which to make a floor to their trenches.
They were quite unco