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Show WEARY OFKILLING French Officer Vividly Portrays Horrors of War. "We Fired My God and They Stretched. Out Dead Our Grape-shot Grape-shot Tore Chunks in Them, But Still They Came." New York. Vividly portraying the horrors of the war in Europe, in fighting fight-ing in mud-filled trenches with French and German and Briton tearing at sach other like savages, killing until exhausted, but alway3 killing, Sergeant Ser-geant Louys of the Two Hundred and Sixteenth regiment of the French infantry in-fantry reserves has written a remarkable remark-able pen picture of the ruthless war in a letter which his fiancee in this city has just received. Writlag from his cot in the General hospital at Havre, the soldier concludes con-cludes this grim epic of a modern war with a picture of the Sisters of Charity. Char-ity. With his .company, the Nineteenth, the sergeant found himself in a trench near Fohtenoy, where the conflict raged fiercely, day and night. After five dayi of furious fighting, his company com-pany was sent back for a short rest, while frftsh troops piled into the mud-filled mud-filled trenches into which a dull, leaden rain was dripping. "Like caricatures fashioned of mud, suddenly called to life, we hobbled weartty out of the holes where we had lived under a hell of bursting shel's, searing flame and nauseous gasSs for days," he writes. "We were relieved by other troops, who saluted us as they passed. "In the trenches we crouch while the shells and bullets from the German Ger-man infantry play over us and, alas, on us. Overhead the moon struggles about in the clouds, for the rain has ceased a little, while mad streaks of white light whisper their way from the German trenches and touch somewhere some-where along our line. In a moment there is a screaming shell where the light was, and we know that some of our comrades have answered France's last call. "We were not paying much attention atten-tion to anything after two hours of this. We just fired when told. Then suddenly at daybreak the Germans came. Fifty yards away we saw them, in the streaky light that beckons beck-ons the sun in these table lands. They came like solid blocks which were machines. ma-chines. We fired my God! We fired into their faces, and they stretched out dead. But they came on, sometimes some-times shouting, sometimes puffing. We beat them with the butt ends of our muskets and we stabbed them with our bayonets. It was horrible. "We were exhausted from killing. Then came the order to abandon the trenches. There were so many there who would nevei hear that order, and others who cried out when they found they could not crawl away from those men, who kept on coming and coming. They looked horrible in the new light, with their stubby, dirty faces; their tight uniforms of the color of the earth. "I walked six miles to Vic-sur-Aisne, to the big hospital. My way was along the pathway of the fire which had been there a short time before. Everywhere Every-where death and desolation. How France suffers! There were tears In my eyes, and they were not tears of pain, ma petite. "At Vic-sur-Aisne the surgeon there, after treating me, sent me, with others, oth-ers, to a sanitary train at the station of Villers-Cotterets, 20 miles away. "For 11 days now I am here. We all are comfortable. We have the attendance at-tendance of the best physicians in Havre, and we have, above all, the care of the Catholic Sisters of Charity. "How shall I praise enough these angels of earth? Of infinite goodness are they, without sentimentality, or affected sensibility. So I have seen them where death and destruction abounded, and so I see them here the same. In these women one finds no romantic goodness that Is in reality real-ity only selfishness projected for self-satisfaction. self-satisfaction. One finds the goodness of great souls; the goodness of a pity that is divine. Here is the spirit of France i France still live.3, thank God! Vive la France!" |