With their cloaks adorned with medals, their theatrical Moorish garments, their kepis and their African headdresses, this heroic band presented, nevertheless, a lamentable aspect.
Very few still preserved the noble vertical carriage, the pride of the superior human being.

They were walking along bent almost double, limping, dragging themselves forward by the help of a staff or friendly arm.

Others had to let themselves be pushed along, stretched out on the hand-carts which had so often conducted the devout sick from the station to the Grotto of the Virgin.

Some were feeling their way along, blindly, leaning on a child or nurse.

The first encounters in Belgium and in the East, a mere half-dozen battles, had been enough to produce these physical wrecks still showing a manly nobility in spite of the most horrible outrages.