Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/302

262 artificial leg to which he failed to accustom himself.

I tried to sound the impulse that had urged him to leave a broker's office to enlist in the Foreign Legion. He could only express it in this way: "I wanted a look in at the last war."

One sought to vindicate his anxiety and his optimism.

Morcover, he was very modest about his medals.

There were other soldiers who had been decorated—either French-Americans on permission, or poor devils like the boy from the Foreign Legion, cast into the vast and pitiful slag heap of war.

There was a wrinkled Canadian-Belgian in the steerage.

"I am fifty-six," he lamented. "I have been wounded three times, but each time I have gone back to the trenches. Now because they say my lungs are weakened they won't let me fight any more. That is absurd. And it was I who destroyed the bridge at Termonde. The fuse had been cut, and the Boches were coming across, firing their machine guns from behind shields of mattresses. I crawled along inside a metal cask to the point where the fuse had been cut. And I lighted the broken end. Pouf! You should