I tended them. By day and by night, a thousand times I ministered to their needs. There were but two basins for seven hundred and twenty wounded. I made part of a shell serve me for a third. I watched the dying; I gave what consolation I could; I buried the dead. Always guarded by two Pomeranian soldiers, I went through the village begging soup for the poor lads. The inhabitants were utterly terrorized. Some of the women, one of them lame and one but a girl of twelve, astonished me by their persistent kindness. Under the eyes of the Germans as they were, the ardour they displayed, simply Christian in character, was truly heroic. Often, however, I had to make up for the lack of rations by a gay speech, overflowing with hope. Continually it was necessary to remake the straw pillows under the heads of the wounded, to rearrange their bedding, to help them to move. Always, beneath the low canvas roof, was to be heard the same orchestra of cries, hollow sighs, death rattles, and lamentations. Occasionally, during the long, cold night, lacking strength to carry the body of some comrade who had just died all the way across the meadow to the burial pit, dropping the dead man, I would fall beside him and go to sleep there. On the 20th, when our field hospital was already in fair order, a Prussian captain came by with his company. He stopped, commandeered the horse of our surgeon-in-chief, M. Bergé, and promptly mounted it. Then, in grating and sonorous French, he called out: “Fear nothing, wounded. I know that in your newspapers—I read them, the _Figaro_, the _Temps_—they term us barbarians. We are not barbarians. For my part, I bear a French name; I am the descendant of French refugees. My name is Charles de Beaulieu. I swear to you that you will be well cared for in Germany. Germany respects the red cross.” At noon on the 28th, having sent away those fit for transport and also those unfit, having performed a last amputation, and having buried the rest of the dead, we set out, with empty stomachs. What was our destination? The innocents, of whom I was one, had no doubt that we should be sent back to France by way of Switzerland. The others, those who had seen the wounded being finished off, especially the wounded officers, declared: “The German military authorities are unrelenting, even though the rankers are good fellows. The patrols who finished off the officers and some of the sergeant-majors were acting on strict orders. If they had been inspired by personal ill-feeling, do you think it likely that they would give coffee and brandy to the wounded as they do often enough? Would they stop to tend them? It is the high command which is responsible for this base practice. Do you think those who set so little store upon the lives of the wounded will respect the red cross?”