One poor fellow whose feet were bare, attracted my attention. When I looked at him more carefully I noticed that he had no shirt and I asked him what had happened to him and what had become of his clothes. At first he did not want to tell me, but when I inquired again, with a kind of embarrassed and self-conscious look upon his face Louis related this tale to me.

His old acquaintance and fellow-townsman, Paul, was in the same company with him. Back in the little home town before the war they had been enemies. They had both been bad men, crooks and drunkards, and had at one time tried to kill each other. For years they had hated and had as little to do with each other as possible. It all started over an insignificant something, but nevertheless the dislike had grown until it had become very bitter and each was continually on the lookout to find a chance to do the other a mean turn when possible. They had cursed each other many a time when their paths crossed, but as far as possible they had tried to avoid meeting. But when the war came they had been placed together side by side as comrades in the battle. Their officers had told them that they were not to think of self now, because their fight was for La Belle France. Day after day they drilled together and week after week performed the hard labor which was allotted them, side by side, until at last they outgrew their ancient antipathy, and finally became bosom friends. Then they were sent to the trenches. Together they held the line in the same fire bay, and hour after hour both looked into the muzzles of the German guns. They had on different occasions gone "over the top" together, and neither of them had been hurt at all. At last, however, early one morning when the Germans made a mighty charge, fate was against both. The bombardment had been blinding and when the Boches came tearing "over the top" these two sturdy poilus stood their ground and held the enemy back. A German was just about to make a lunge at Louis when Paul, with a spring, jumped in front of him, receiving a bayonet thrust in his lung, and also a terrible wound in his ankle. Louis had been painfully wounded in his left shoulder. His wound was not dangerous but Paul was about "done in," and was breathing hard as he had lost a large amount of blood from the hole in the lower part of his leg. Here the narrator's eyes began to fill with tears.

"I couldn't let the poor fellow bleed to death after he had saved my life. I tore up my shirt into bandages and tied them around his leg, and then so they would not come off and also to keep his feet warm I took my socks and pulled them on his feet. What else could I do? I tried to fix up his injured lung also, but—" and then the tears burst forth and he sobbed like a baby. "It didn't do any good and Paul lies over there now." I glanced over in the direction where he pointed and sure enough there was Paul, bandaged up with strips of shirt and wearing a pair of socks over the bandages. But the black angel had already come to him. He had "gone West."

I talked with the man a little more and he opened up his heart to me. At best life is a strange thing to understand. Here were two human beings who previously, by heredity or environment, or else their own devilishness, had been evil characters. They were known as such by their acquaintances and they knew each other as such. Their lives had been unenviable to say the least, and then at last through war, that fearful and awful thing, each man had been made better and the angel had come out of what before seemed a devil. Not only was Paul a bad man but he had hated the other man and yet here he was doing a noble and self-sacrificing deed and not only that, but doing it for his enemy; giving up his life for his old foe.

And here was the other man, showing a gratitude which was noble towards the man he had hated and who had tried to kill him. He gave up his own shirt and took off his own socks to try to keep warm the feet of the dying Paul and to keep the blood, which meant life, in his body. It did not accomplish the result but my narrator would not take back his socks as he said he wanted the man who died for him to have this little gift and be buried in them. Such heroism is not uncommon in the trenches.

After all there are some compensations even for war. In many instances it may bring out all the hate and the hell that is in a man's heart but I have also seen hundreds of cases where it made men much better than they had ever been before. It made them better men and better Christians; not necessarily of the shouting type but of the kind, of which One said: "He that giveth a cup of cold water to one of these little ones, shall not lose his reward," and again, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend."

But someone may think I am preaching. Well, if I am, I am preaching the gospel of service and sacrifice, which to my mind is the greatest gospel there is to preach at the present critical hour. I am trying to tell men that they can be better men wherever they are if they will it so. I have known men to go over there from various walks of life, some of them from wealthy homes and high salaried positions to engage in this or that line of work, perhaps relieving suffering without getting anything for their labor, and yet boast that they had received more than they had ever gotten in their lives before, and it was true. They developed a feeling of kinship for the suffering, and a satisfaction in assuaging their pain which was a greater compensation than anything they had ever had or could ever have expected. I have known men to go over in the very trenches themselves and there learn the lesson of self-control and humility which is in reality learning to respect the rights of other people; men who formerly had been accustomed to having their own way in life.

Copyright, Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.

A DRESSING STATION SET UP ON NEWLY CAPTURED GROUND.

In a very short time after the capture of new territory not only do the infantry and the artillery move up to maintain the new position, but the first-aid dressing stations take their places on the newly captured ground also.