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Wounded Heroes of France: Patriotism

Patriotism becomes a passion.

Only austere love of duty can sustain a man at such a height. A schoolmaster-sergeant of Lyon, Philippe Gonnard, voices it to a friend inclined to pity him: he was ill enough to get his freedom, but wished, nevertheless, to keep at his post until he was killed: "I intend to stay at the front. . . . Patriotism for me is a passion. Does that mean that I am happy here far from all I love? You do not think that and I have often said I am not, in prose and verse. But from now until peace, no man of heart can be happy. If I came back, I should be still less happy, because instead of being dissatisfied with my lot, I should be dissatisfied with myself." Strong will and nobility of soul.

More or less consciously, this was the rock bottom of the character of the soldier of France after three and a half years of war: "Will always on the stretch, anguish conquered, melancholy transformed into nobility of soul--as long as literature does not portray these essential traits of the soldier," says one of our best author-combatants, "all it creates will only be artificial and bear no relation to reality." "No matter, it is for France." "No matter, it is for France!" says the wounded soldier to the comrades bending over him, and if it is during an attack he tells them not to stop, not to carry him away "because it is no longer worth while," but to continue without him the noble work for which he is offering his life. Let a chaplain bring him divine help in time and he will die more than resigned, joyous and radiant in the faith of his childhood, bewailing his sins and kissing the crucifix like the French of the Middle Ages. 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! Most of the wounded recover.

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.

The slightly wounded are lucky.

The most unfortunate.

Those slightly wounded have not much merit, it must be confessed, in being resigned or even joyful. After a rapid dressing at the first station they will rest several days at the hospital at the front, and then get leave of convalescence which they will pass with their families. A wound for them, who can bear a little suffering, means an unexpected holiday and supplementary permission. They are only sorry if they are hit stupidly, out of action or at the beginning of a well-prepared attack, and prevented from going on with it. Let us leave them to their good luck, and stay longer with the severely wounded, those, for instance, who have a leg or arm broken, a fractured jaw, vertebrae or ribs bruised, or are deprived of one of their senses--blind, deaf, paralyzed. We unhesitatingly acknowledge that these three last categories of wounded feel their misery profoundly, and need time to get used to it. Those, happily much more numerous, who have only temporarily or permanently lost the use of one of their limbs, generally consider themselves very fortunate. "I have the good wound!" they affect to say, meaning that the War is over for them. So at least they express themselves, not at all wishing to be admired, and trying as it were, to minimize their courage in bearing their trial.