How many times, in the horrible frame of modern war, have
words been uttered, scenes enacted, agonies suffered which echoed the
most sublime passages of the _Chanson de Roland_!
[Sidenote: Most of the wounded recover.]
[Sidenote: Many times wounded.]
But, thank God, among those who fall without being killed outright, the
minority are mortally wounded. Most of them are destined to get well or
at least to survive: they know it, and are glad. As soon as they regain
consciousness after the shock, the first idea is: "Am I really not
dead?" To be wounded does not disconcert them at all. "We are here for
that!" said, the other day, one of my young friends of the class 1915,
who by exception has been preserved until now. The alternative, in this
present War, is not to come out of it wounded, or unwounded, but wounded
or dead: to escape death is all that one can reasonably ask. Men who
have only been wounded once, are more and more scarce, some have
returned to the front four or five times. We had at the hospital a year
ago an American sergeant of the Foreign Legion, engaged at Orleans in
August, 1914, who having fought in Champagne, on the Somme and in
Alsace, had received three wounds, the last at the end of 1915, at
Belloy-en-Santerre, when a German bomb had badly damaged his left thigh:
"the last" up to that time, for he had to go back under fire and will in
all probability receive a fourth wound.
[Sidenote: The slightly wounded are lucky.]
[Sidenote: The most unfortunate.
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