"After the battle, that day, you couldn't hear yourselves talk any more in the trenches for the cries of the wounded. It was like one great uninterrupted wail. You could make out appeals, prayers, calls for help, women's names. Then, little by little, silence came again, as a good many of them died. What we heard sound longest on the battlefield, from one end to the other, was the word 'Mother!' It is always those who are dying who call like that; we know that well now." Alas! What do we not know now of the many-sided anguish and horror of death! We must certainly begin, like the little Turco, to qualify as lucky the fellows whom destiny delivers up to the hospital. And yet how they suffer, even these. To physical torture is added too often the worst tortures of the spirit. "In the two months I've been away, not one bit of news of my family has reached me," a soldier told me, "except a despatch announcing my father's death." Another had lost a fifteen-year-old son, whom he adored, two hours before his departure. "His body was still warm: my wife was as if mad with sorrow." They tell you these things without complaint. France called them: it was quite natural to answer her, to go to her out of the midst of the greatest sorrows, the deepest affections, the keenest happiness; sometimes, like that young engineer there of twenty, married eleven months ago to a girl of eighteen, to tear yourself away from a whole romance! He had been rejected for defective vision, but, and his wife agreed, he decided this did not matter any more, now that mobilization was under way, and that he must go. Two days after the birth of a fine boy--a future soldier, the mother said--he left his life of ease and tenderness and reported at the barracks as a simple soldier; and he had been encouraged to do so by that little Parisienne whom we should have thought absorbed in nothing but society and dress. VI--STORY OF THE DEATH OF A MARTYR The little soldier Mèchin had a serious hemorrhage in the night; he was in the operating room when I arrived at the hospital this morning. The Sister had sent his parents to pray in the chapel, they explained to me. The work of attending to the sick went on as usual; nothing must be allowed to stop the movement of the wheels. Toward ten o'clock I saw the litter coming back, borne slowly and with infinite precautions. Sister Gabrielle walked quite near it, and never stopped repeating: "Gently, more gently still." The little soldier's face was as pale as a corpse; his eyes, which seemed to have sunk back in their orbits, were closed. When he was lifted up to put him on the bed, the shock, light as it was, brought on the supreme crisis. His breath, slow and scarcely perceptible, quickened strangely. His candid blue eyes opened, dilated, immense, as if looking for some one. "He wants his parents," the Sister said to me in a low voice. "Go and find them quickly. It's the end."