“Oh, my little one, are you alive still? is that great happiness in store for me, brute that I am?  Wait a moment, let me see.”

He examined the wound with great tenderness by the light of the burning buildings.  The bayonet had gone through the right arm near the shoulder, but a more serious part of the business was that it had afterward entered the body between two of the ribs and probably touched the lung.  Still, the wounded man breathed without much apparent difficulty, but the right arm hung useless at his side.

“Poor old boy, don’t grieve!  We shall have time to say good-by to each other, and it is better thus, you see; I am glad to have done with it all.  You have done enough for me to make up for this, for I should have died long ago in some ditch, even as I am dying now, had it not been for you.”

But Jean, hearing him speak thus, again gave way to an outburst of violent grief.

“Hush, hush!  Twice you saved me from the clutches of the Prussians.  We were quits; it was my turn to devote my life, and instead of that I have slain you.  Ah, tonnerre de Dieu! I must have been drunk not to recognize you; yes, drunk as a hog from glutting myself with blood.”

Tears streamed from his eyes at the recollection of their last parting, down there, at Remilly, when they embraced, asking themselves if they should ever meet again, and how, under what circumstances of sorrow or of gladness.  It was nothing, then, that they had passed toilsome days and sleepless nights together, with death staring them in the face?  It was to bring them to this abominable thing, to this senseless, atrocious fratricide, that their hearts had been fused in the crucible of those weeks of suffering endured in common?  No, no, it could not be; he turned in horror from the thought.

“Let’s see what I can do, little one; I must save you.”

The first thing to be done was to remove him to a place of safety, for the troops dispatched the wounded Communists wherever they found them.  They were alone, fortunately; there was not a minute to lose.  He first ripped the sleeve from wrist to shoulder with his knife, then took off the uniform coat.  Some blood flowed; he made haste to bandage the arm securely with strips that he tore from the lining of the garment for the purpose.  After that he staunched as well as he could the wound in the side and fastened the injured arm over it, He luckily had a bit of cord in his pocket, which he knotted tightly around the primitive dressing, thus assuring the immobility of the injured parts and preventing hemorrhage.

“Can you walk?”

“Yes, I think so.”

But he did not dare to take him through the streets thus, in his shirt sleeves.  Remembering to have seen a dead soldier lying in an adjacent street, he hurried off and presently came back with a capote and a kepi.  He threw the greatcoat over his friend’s shoulders and assisted him to slip his uninjured arm into the left sleeve.  Then, when he had put the kepi on his head: