"_Eh, c'est le sort des batailles_," said Gouraud gaily, to his pale and stumbling friend.

"One would have said he was two men in one," said another old comrade--"one was betrayed to me by his works; the other spoke to me in his words." The legends of him in hospital are many.

He was determined to walk again--and quickly.

"One has to teach these legs," he said impatiently, "to walk naturally, not like machines." Hence the steeple-chases over all kinds of obstacles--stools, cushions, chairs--that his nurses must needs arrange for him in the hospital passages; and later on his determined climbing of any hill that presented itself--at first leaning on his mother (General Gouraud has never married), then independently.
He was wounded at the end of June, 1915.

At the beginning of November he was sent at the head of a French Military Mission to Italy, and on his return in December was given the command of the Fourth French Army, the Army of Champagne.