Those soldiers I talked to in the general headquarters--how many of
them are now alive? They were the men who fought in Alsace and
Lorraine, when whole battalions were decimated under a withering
shell-fire beyond the endurance of human courage, and who
marched forward to victories, and backward in retreats, and forward
again over the dead bodies of their comrades and corrupting heaps
of German dead, in an ebb and flow of warfare which made the fields
and the woods one great stench of horror, from which there came
back madmen and maimed creatures, and young men, lucky with
slight wounds, who told the tale of things they had seen as though
they had escaped from hell. I met some of them afterwards and
turned sick and faint as I listened to their stories; and afterwards on
the western side of the French front, three hundred miles from Nancy,
I came upon the dragoons of Belfort who had ridden past me in the
sunshine of those August days. Then they had been very fine to see
in their clean uniforms and on their glossy horses, garlanded with
flowers. At the second meeting they were stained and warworn, and
their horses limped with drooping heads, and they rode as men who
have seen many comrades fall and have been familiar with the ways
of death.
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