He struggled hard to get the connection, in his mind, over the telephone. The wires seemed to be cut, and he cried out in anxiety and distress. Then he grew more and more feeble, and gasped more and more, and became almost inarticulate, in his efforts. He was distressed. But suddenly he got it. He screamed out very loud, relieved, satisfied, triumphant, startling them all. "_Ca y est, maintenant! Ca y est! C'est le bon Dieu a l'appareil_!" (All right now! All right! It is the good God at the telephone!) A drop of blood spotted the sheet, a sudden vivid drop which spread rapidly, coming through. The surgeon raised himself. "Finished here!" he exclaimed with satisfaction. "Finished here," repeated the _Directrice_. PARIS, 26 June, 1916. A CITATION As a person, Grammont amounted to very little. In private life, before the war broke out, he had been an acrobat in the streets of Paris, and after that he became a hotel boy in some little fifth-rate hotel over behind the Gare St. Lazare. That had proved his undoing, for even the fifth-rate French travelling salesmen and sharpers and adventurers who patronized the hotel had money enough for him to steal. He stole a little, favoured by his position as _garcon d'hotel_, and the theft had landed him, not in jail, but in the _Bataillon d'Afrique_. He had served in that for two years, doing his military service in the _Bataillon d'Afrique_ instead of jail, while working off his five year sentence, and then war being declared, his regiment was transferred from Morocco to France, to Flanders, to the front line trenches, and in course of time he arrived one day at the hospital with a piece of shell in his spleen.