At his call, the other wounded men struggled up. Two with
broken legs grasped their rifle and opened fire. The hero with his left
arm hanging limp, grabbed a bayonet. When I stood up, with all my
senses about me now, some of the Germans were wounded and
others were scrambling out of the trench in a panic. But with his back
to the sand-bags stayed a German Unter-offizier, enormous,
sweating, apoplectic with rage, who fired two revolver shots in our
direction. The man who had first organized the defence of the trench
--the hero of that "Arise, ye dead!"--received a shot full in the throat
and fell. But the man who held the bayonet and who had dragged
himself from corpse to corpse, staggered up at four feet from the
sand-bags, missed death from two shots, and plunged his weapon
into the German's throat. The position was saved, and it was as
though the dead had really risen.
15
The French soldier, as I have said, is strangely candid in the analysis
of his emotions, and is not ashamed of confessing his fears. I
remember a young lieutenant of Dragoons who told me of the terror
which took possession of him when the enemy's shrapnel first burst
above his head.
"As every shell came whizzing past, and then burst, I ducked my
head and wondered whether it was this shell which was going to kill
me, or the next.
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