When I had seen this curious sight, I went on my way to look after a captain of the Garde Mobile, who was shot through the foot, and a young corporal of the Line, shot through the left lung. The latter was a very bad case, not likely to recover; the ball had descended in the cavity of the chest, and the air which the poor lad was breathing entered and escaped through the perforation. Presently, a boy of about sixteen came in, the friend and companion of the dying corporal. He had but a few minutes to remain, and in this short time he learned from me that his friend's wound was mortal, and that he must now bid him a hasty farewell. The parting scene between them was most touching, for they were attached comrades. Among the number brought in to-day by our ambulance was one who came under my charge, and whose case was of interest by reason of his tender years. He was a fine lad, only seventeen, and had served in the Garde Mobile. He had been shot through the leg; but the principal cause of his lamentation was not his wound; it was that he had not fired a shot the whole day, nor even so much as got a chance of bowling over a German, though all the while shells and bullets were falling about him like rain, and dealt wholesale destruction on his company. The account which he gave of the fighting outside was terrible; it seemed to have made a deep impression on his imagination, yet did not in the least take from his courage. He told me he had not eaten for twenty-four hours. How, I often said to myself, could soldiers fight, who were habitually suffering from hunger, cold, and fatigue, like these poor fellows? All this time the ground literally shook from the conflict which was going on outside the town. I think that, as an artillery fight, it was second only to Sedan. It had been freezing very hard every night, and snow was lying deep on the ground. If people at home (and there are some who talk much around their comfortable fires about going to war on every paltry provocation) could have seen the waggon-loads of half-frozen wounded which were brought in to us on the night of the 4th, and those again who lay outside the town without assistance, their wounds uncared for, and exposed to the bitterly cold night air, how soon they would change their idle tone! how they would loathe and abominate the very name of war! I can understand that men find a pleasure in studying the art of fighting, as they do in playing a game of chess; and I have allowed in my own case the fascination which even its horrid reality is capable of exercising over one. But for the man who deems it a pleasure and a glory to use the science of war as a weapon wherewith to annihilate thousands of human beings, for the delusion called "prestige," or in the game of politics, I would have him to know that it is a foul and monstrous thing, full of hideous suffering, cruelty, and injustice, with nothing to redeem it, save the courage whereby such miseries are endured.