While I was writing, something happened. An ugly sound broke the spell. Some one was coming to the hospice. There was the sound of a motor-bicycle, from a long way off, coming through the stillness. There was the calling of its horn and then it was at the door.
I heard the door open, and a cry of delight; and a man's young voice, joyous, high-keyed, intense, and a woman's voice, laughing and sobbing.
I saw the sun come up out of the snow, I saw all the marvellous things that there are between darkness and dawn.
I had made myself stay awake the whole night through, to not lose one minute of the mountains. The mountains were mine, from sunset through the dusk and the dark and the moonlight, to the dark again, and through that other so different dusk that is before the dawn, to the sun's great silent rising, and the full glory of the day.
It was the son of the woman of the gold ear-rings and the red shawl, who had come home in the night, unexpected, for six days' leave.
He was out in the morning pastures, a tall lean mountain boy, with gleaming white teeth, and brown eyes like his mother's, but laughing, and with absurd dimples in his brown young face.
His mother was out with him in the dawn, the red shawl over her head, keeping close beside him as he went swinging across the pastures, her short step almost running by his long step.
The Little Maître d'Hotel
Our little worried grey butler is gone.
His class has been called out, the class of Quatre-vingt-douze.
It appears he was only forty-three.
I had thought he was sixty at least. It must be because he has been anxious all his life that he seems so old.
He was terribly worried and anxious when he talked to me, the night before he went, about the old father and mother he must leave. He would be going probably only somewhere back of the lines to guard a bridge or a railway, but for him it meant—who knows what darkly, helplessly imagined things? He talked a great deal in a high-pitched voice—standing there, very white in his proper livery—of bayonet attacks, of the coal he had managed to get in for the old people, of dying for France, and of his mother's rheumatism, and of the cow they had had to sell.
The Garage
There are twelve convalescents installed after a fashion in the garage half-way down the field path. They are so nearly well that they can make up their beds and sweep out their rooms and wash at the pump and go down to eat at the canteen of the hospital Sainte Barbe. They go to the Clinique there every second or third or fourth day. An orderly comes up from there once in a while with clean linen for them. And that is all they need be troubled about. They are quite comfortable and very forlorn.
They spend their days hanging out of the windows of the loft over the garage or sitting about the big board table of the space underneath, where the motors used to be kept.
Most of them are men from cities who do not know what to do with the country, and the three or four who are country boys know so well what to do with vines and fields, that the vines and fields they may not labour, so close about them here, only worry them. They are the men who get most cross and quarrelsome over the games of cards at the board table.
They all quarrel more or less. Sometimes I wonder, how can men who are so splendid, so simply, steadily, dumbly splendid, who have been through so much, seen death so close, and life so close, quarrel like this over nothing at all. But most times I understand.
The crickets trill all the hot noons in the grass, and the droning of the bees sounds very hot. Like clouds of white butterflies drift over the path, make little drifting butterfly shadows on the path. There is a most wonderful smell of clover in the heat. Down under the fields there are heaped together the crowded old rust-red and burnt umber and golden roofs of the town. And all away beyond there is the valley, opened out, long road and river, to high, far distances of mountains and snows.
I go and sit with my friends about the big board table, in the place where the motors used to be kept. I play cards with my friends, the twelve convalescents. I play badly, for I hate cards, but they like to have a guest. They try to arrange the game so that I may win. They want me to win; they think that I will enjoy it better. If they knew how bored I am they would be dreadfully upset. I wish I loved cards and could play well, to please them.
Towards evening they are certain to be cross with one another.
One after the other they will soon be going back to the Front, all of them. There is not one of them who will go unwillingly. They have been there, they know what it is, but there is not one who will grumble when he goes back, or fail when he faces that again. Every one of them, when he goes back, will say the same thing. "Of course I must go back, all the comrades are there." "Tous les copains sont là-bas." But in the meantime they quarrel.
From the doors of the garage, wide, one sees the sunset among the mountains. The bats flit across and the owls call. The dusk comes, velvet-thick and soft, with smells of fields and vineyards and of the town's hearth fires, and with the myriad voices of cigale and frog and sleepy bird, and with the small life noises of the town. Gathering up, and folding in, the night comes.
There is electric light in the garage that my friends are very proud of indeed. A huge naked bulb dangles from a cord over the table where we sit playing cards.
Francine
The son of Francine is home on leave.
Francine comes every day to help in the kitchen. She was scrubbing the kitchen's grey stone flags when her son came.
He came swinging up the path between the wheat and poppies and cornflowers. He came up the terrace steps, in his leggings and his béret, a fine young diable bleu.
Francine came, running, wiping her red hands in her apron, suddenly beautiful and very proud.
Railway Station, The Days of the 25th
The trains of wounded arrive almost always at dawn, the late autumn dawn.
The lamps of the station are still burning, but grow pale.
Beyond the open platform, across the tracks, you can see that dawn has come to the sky, behind the mountains.
There is a star in the midst of the dawn, Hesper, star of both the twilights, very big and bright and near, like a lamp.
It is very cold.
In the pale light of the dawn and the pale light of the station lamps they wait for the train of wounded to come in.
The Red Cross has a cantine at the station in what used to be the buffet. But these men will be past need of coffee and soup.
The cart of the buffet, that used to be pushed along the trains with breakfasts under the carriage windows, is heaped now, in these days, with very strange things. There is need of these things, always. There is this, and that, that cannot wait.
The doctors from the Lycée Prince Victor, now the big military hospital, are there by the chariot. They stand waiting and talking together. They turn up their coat collars and sink their hands in their pockets and stamp their feet in the cold of the dawn.
The orderlies wait with their stretchers, back against the wall, under the gay posters of places where people used to go to be amused.
The Red Cross nurses keep back in the cantine, where it is warmer.
The train is late. It has been from three to six hours late each one of these dreadful mornings.
Everything has been ready since long, long ago, in the deepest dark of the night.
If only there are enough blankets.
The train is terribly, terribly late.
New Ones
It was for this that they evacuated last week all who could possibly be moved, to fill the wards with other broken things. They gathered up all the broken things that had lain here so long, and sent them away. And now the wards are full of other broken things.
The old ones had grown accustomed to the rooms. They had suffered and been unhappy in these rooms, and when they had to go away they did not want to go. They had nothing left but the place and people of their suffering, and they found, when they had to go, that they loved the place and the people they had grown so used to. They seemed to be afraid to go away. To all the weariness was added this new weariness.
And now the wards are full of new ones.
The new ones lie very still.
Deaths
It is quite simple.
If it can be that the priest comes, it is very well. All that the priest does is beautiful. The feet and hands, the eyes, the lips have sinned, and the touch of forgiveness upon them is exquisite. It is exquisite, that last entering in of the Divine Body to the body that is dying. But if for any reason no priest comes, if no one cares or troubles to ask for him, or if there is no time, God is most surely there and understands. And one is comforted to find that there is no need to fear for them, as they die.
They die so quietly. I am glad to know how quiet a thing it is to die.
There was only one who was not quiet.
They bound ice about his head, and then he did not shriek and fling himself about any more, but lay quite quietly until he died.
Another Winter, Thursday, October 7th
When the rain had gone over, in the late afternoon, and the clouds were lifted and drifted a little, we saw that there was snow on all the near mountains, through the pines, upon the pastures.
The cold wet street was full of excited swallows. Here was the cold. The cold was come too soon. They never yet had gone south so early.
Dear me, dear me—where would they stop the night?
Up under all the old shaggy rusty eaves, that reach out over the narrow streets, hundreds and hundreds of swallows were crowding each other in and out of sheltered places, such a fluttering and twittering. Under thatch and tiles, along the ledges of fine proud old stone windows, and of wine-red wooden balconies, they pushed and crowded each other, and in and out of the brown clayey nests that summer had abandoned.
People in the streets stopped to watch, laughing a little.
People in the cold, wet streets stopped to watch the swallows, women and old people and children.
"They have seen the snow on the mountains," said the people to one another, laughing a little.
And then always, every one said, each to the other, the same thing.
The one thought of all of them together, "Another winter."
PART III
Paris
Monday, October 11th
I was thinking all night in the train—how can I look at them, how can I speak to them in their depth of grief? I was thinking—when the old woman comes to open the door, what can I say to her? When the old man comes to take my big dressing-case and my little dressing-case, and my strap of books, how can I face him? Their son is dead.
The son of our concierge is dead. "Mort au Champ d'Honneur."
They were so proud of him. They did so worship him. He was such a clever boy that he had gone beyond anything they had ever imagined. If you just in passing saw him with them, you thought he did not belong to them at all. You thought he was a gentleman who was waiting a minute for some reason, there in the loge. But you would have known, if you had had time for it, how he worshipped them and was proud of them; they had worked so hard, his little fat slow sweet mother in the neat black dress, and his little stumpy cross father, who made it a point to come to the door in his shirt sleeves.
In those wonderful first days the son of our concierge went away.
It was on Tuesday, the second day, in the afternoon, about five o'clock. He had to be at the Gare d'Austerlitz at seven, and getting there was difficult.
I think that day was the most cruel and most wonderful of all. I shall always remember how hot it was, and how the leaves were fallen in the garden.
They told me how it seemed as if he really could not go. He kept starting, and coming back; and starting, and coming back. He hugged his little fat old mother, in her neat black dress; and hugged her, and had to turn back to hug her again. His father was going with him, to help carry the bundles. He was in his shirt sleeves. He kept blowing and blowing his nose. His mother had said she would not come to the door. But she did come to the door. She had said she would not stand to watch him go. But she did, crying and smiling and waving to him. He got to the street corner four different times. And three of the times he came back, to hug her just once again.
And he is killed.
There will be the little stumpy father in his shirt sleeves, and the little, so very respectable mother, fat and slow.
How can I look at them? What can I say to them?
They must open the door for us, and pay the taxi, and carry up our things.
How can I tell them that I kneel before their sorrow as if it were a throne?
Same day, 11th of October
The first thing to do was to go up to my neighbour's queer big kitchen—up on the roofs—because there were eleven little soldiers at supper, to whom, though I have not been here to see them until now, I must say good-bye. It is the last day of their leave, they will be off to-morrow.
Always my permissionnaires eat with my neighbour's permissionnaires together in the kitchen on the roof. They are always men from the invaded countries, who have nowhere to go for their leave.
Before, they have always been men who had been in hospitals and were sent to us for their sick-leave; but these are little young boys, the Classe Seize, just from their dépôts, with a few days of leave before their beginning of battle. The oldest of them is nineteen.
You go up to the kitchen by a little twisted stairway, like the stairway of a tower. On three sides of the kitchen there are charming blue mansarde roofs and black crooked chimney-pots, and on the fourth side there are the treetops of an old garden. When the leaves are fallen, one can look down from the kitchen terrace, through the branches of the trees, and see all the design of the garden, paths and lawns, statues and massifs and the big central basin, as in the ground plan, drawn so long ago.
To-night the fallen leaves in the sunset made the garden a place all of amber. One looked down into an amber glow. And all the roofs and treetops of the quarter, and the two tall towers of Sainte Clotilde, seemed translucent; for the gold of the sunset to shine through.
The kitchen has a floor of polished red brick tiles and shines with beautiful copper pots.
Eleven little soldiers were just finishing their coffee at the table with the red cloth.
What babies they are. And how alike they look, all of them. It is absurd. Eleven round close-cropped heads; eleven round rosy peasant faces; eleven pairs of round clear eager questioning eyes; eleven straight young figures, with stiff gestures, in bleu d'horizon.
Classe Seize, eighteen years, nineteen years, twenty years. It has become the age to die.
Tuesday, October 12th
The Chocolates
I went to get some chocolates at a little shop near the hospital.
The woman of the shop counted me out the heap of chocolates one by one in their silver paper.
She was a thin pale little woman with the sort of blue eyes that are always sad. Her eyes looked as if they had cried and cried, in her worn faded little face. She had the little woollen cape of the quarter around her shoulders and her pale hair was rather grey.
While she was counting the chocolates the postman came. He brought a big square yellow envelope addressed in that special writing, surely, of a little soldier, and with the franchise militaire.
I thought—It is a letter from her son.
She took it, thanking the postman, and put it down on the table and went on counting out the chocolates.
"But, Madame," I said, "are you not going to read your letter?"
She turned and I saw that she was crying.
"It is from my son," she said.
She began putting the chocolates in handfuls into a paper bag.
She said, "This morning I had a notice from the Mairie that he is killed."
The Goldfish and the Watch
On a table in the window there was an opal-blue bowl full of water, with purple iris floating in it, and little bright goldfish, four of them, glinting through it.
Some one had given it that day to the children.
René, the eldest boy, stood by the table watching the goldfish, not thinking of his father at all.
There were minutes in the days when he did not think of his father.
But afterwards it was always the same thing.
He never told any one, because he was seven years old and very shy. No one would have understood. And it was dreadful to him when people did not understand.
It was about his father's watch.
On one thick, hot, velvet-black night, his father had come into his room and waked him with a sudden switching on of the light, and said, "Hop up, old chap, you've got to go and tell your mother to stop crying."
"But, father, why? Will she not stop when you tell her?"
"It is because of me that she cries. I have got to go away."
"Oh, father, why have you got to go away?"
"Because there is war, René. I have got to go and fight. And you have got to stay and look after your mother. Quick now; go to her and say, 'I'm here.'"
"But, father——"
"Here's my watch for you, old chap, and the chain, you see. Mind you take care of it. Don't let it run down. I want to find it right to the minute when I come back. And I want to find your mother well, not crying—and you, my brave little man, taking care of everything for me."
"Like the watch, father?"
"Yes, like the watch."
So he had to take simply terrible care of his father's watch.
If it ran down, if he let it run down, what in the world would not happen?
The battles might be lost to France. His mother might die. And then whatever could he say to his father?
In the days he used to hurry home from everything, to the watch. And in the nights he used to sit up in bed to listen for its ticking. He would stay awake for hours in the nights, afraid it might stop and he not know. Often in the nights he would cry from the tiredness of having to keep awake and listen. But in the days he would forget the watch, sometimes, for a little.
To-day he was happy because of the goldfish.
Hospital, Friday, October 15th
Just these days the people of several of the men have been coming from far to see them.
Way off, in some little town of Brittany or the Béarn, or Provence, there had arrived word that the soldier this or that had been wounded thus or so, and was at the hospital. Upon months and months of waiting in dreadful, helpless ignorance, the shock had come as a relief almost.
But how strange and terrible a thing the journey was to people who could understand so little what they must do. Where to go, what to do. Perhaps they were people who had never ventured beyond the town where the diligence stopped, who never had taken a train. They did not know what the Champagne meant. They did not know where Paris was. The departure was a tremendous thing. A tearing up of roots and cutting with a knife. Then the journey, confused and terrifying. Then the great city, and the great hospital.
There is a moment when it seems as if it were a stranger, the boy lying there, in the bed that is one of such a long row of beds. His people stand, a little dazed, down by the door. The long ward, the two long rows of beds against its walls, the stretcher-beds down the middle of it; and all those boys who lie so still—how strange it seems to them! And their boy, who does not wave his hand or shout to them, who scarcely lifts his head—his smile has changed, has come to be quite a different smile.
Hospital, Sunday, October 17th
Number 24
Number twenty-four is dying. I am very glad. It is much better for him that he should die. But it takes so long. It is terrible that it should take so long to die.
He calls me, "Ma petite dame."
"My little lady, what time is it?"
Strange, how they ask that, so many of them, when they are dying.
There is a clock on the wall opposite his bed. They tell me that for three weeks he has not been able to see it. He says the room is full of mist.
He says, "My little lady, can you see the clock?"
I always answer, "No, I cannot see the clock."
He says, "You cannot see it because of the mist."
And I say, "I cannot see it, because of the mist."
La Mort d'un Civil
The old Monsieur is dying. He has been dying for days and days and days. He is dying at a time when death is very cheap. Every one is dying. The youth of the whole world is being taken away. What does it matter at all that an old man, who has no part in the war, is taken away? Who, except his elderly maiden daughter, has time to care?
Cousine Gertrude is very kind. She comes every evening, after the hospital, and stays for two hours, sitting in the room, knitting grey socks, while his daughter rests a little.
Her boy François, aged twenty-one, went out on the first day. He has been all the time in the trenches, except for one leave of six days. He is in the trenches now, in Champagne.
The man dying here has everything that is possible done for him. He has the best that can be had of doctors and nurses.
These boys in the trenches one dares not think of how it may be with them.
His daughter is very brave. She never cries. She remembers that Cousine Gertrude would like a cup of tea.
She knows that the son of Cousine Gertrude is young and beautiful.
Death, in these days, is young and beautiful.
And her father is old. His death is only a dreary thing.
She understands that even people as good as Cousine Gertrude must grudge it its place in the world.
Canal
In all the mornings and nights, going to the hospital and coming back from it, I love my canals. The canals of Venice, of Holland, rivers and great waterfalls and fountains and the waterways of kings' gardens, that people travel far to find beautiful, are beautiful for all the world. But my canal is beautiful for just me.
Its narrow stone-bound curve is hung over by uncared-for plane-trees, and by ragged, jagged, rickety, crooked houses, that lilt and tilt and lean together and over, dingy and dark. The rough cobbled quays have small traffic now, the litter of the canal's old life is gone from them. They are quiet, with no more rough calling and shouting of carters, and turmoil of hoofs and wheels. Sometimes, but rarely, a slow heavy flat canal boat is towed and poled along, through the locks and under the high black bridges. But most times the slow tawny water flows unbroken.
The tawny leaves of the plane-trees are fallen, and lie on the cobbles and in the water. The stems and branches of the plane-trees have black reflections in the water, with the reflections of crazy roofs and chimney-pots, and of tatters and rags of colour from windows and walls.
Sometimes in the mornings, these October mornings of sardius and topaz and sapphire, I find myself singing as I walk along the edge of my canal. It is so difficult not to be happy.
Hospital
My hospital was, all of it, built in the time that means lovely things of red-brick and grey stone and blue gables. The courtyards are paved with huge ancient cobbles, and there are grass plots that are green and wet, and big trees and bushes whose leaves are falling slowly in blue stillness.
There are more than two thousand sick in my hospital, six hundred wounded of the war, one hundred and fifty of them in our service.
I love to write "my" hospital and "our" service.
Madame Marthe
Hospital, Tuesday, October 19th
Things had been very bad all day. When night came it seemed dreadful to go away and leave so much suffering. I thought of the night, with fever and that special helplessness which belongs to the night.
I would have been so glad to stay the night out with the ward.
I said that to Madame Marthe, as we left together.
She said, "But why?"
She always has a cold and wears a little blue woollen cape over her blouse and apron. When she leaves the hospital she pins up the two black ribbon streamers of her cap of the tri-couleurs and wraps her arms around in the blue woollen cape. She looks very small and cold and poor.
"Why?" she asked.
The hospital is her world and she is thankful for every minute she can get away from it.
I leave my world to come to it.
I was ashamed to say to her, "It is for my own comfort I want to stay, to make myself imagine that I really am needed."
Hospital
Things They Say
Perhaps in other, different kinds of hospitals, hospitals of the little good sisters, or of ladies of the Red Cross, hospitals of beautiful influences, one could not love the men so much. In hospitals where the beautiful things of the Faith, prayers and tenderness and peace, are all around about the pain and death; and there are words for praise of courage and sacrifice, and words for sympathy and for hope, and words for high ideals; where it is as poets and painters and all people have always imagined it, perhaps one could not get quite this understanding of things that are not said, or come in so rough and vivid a way, upon unimagined things.
One loves to think of the wounded soldier with the nun beside him, and of the lady of the great world tending the peasant hero. One loves to hear of the men saying, "C'est pour la France."
Here there are no pictures I would dare call beautiful. It is crude and raw. And things are not said. When there is not too much suffering, it is rough. And when the suffering is great, it is all very dumb.
Here there is no one who knows how to word things. The men do not know, and the nurses do not know how to tell them. They all only just go on.
The nurses are poor women, of the people. They come, each one of them, from her own small desperate struggle for life, each from her own crushing deadening small miseries and cares, without any help of dream and vision, callously—one, just looking on, might think—to their work in the hospital. To the great magnificent suffering, each one of them comes dulled and hardened by some small sordid helpless suffering of her own. Everything has always been a struggle, and this is just part of it. They work on every day, and all day long, with no one to put into words for them, devotion and sacrifice. No one here speaks of those things, or thinks of them, or even knows.
When I see my little Madame Marthe, my chief, so very tired, I say to her, "You work so hard." And she always says, shrugging her thin round shoulders, "Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, i' faut b'en. Nous sommes là pour ça." If I dared to tell the patronne, who is intelligent to bitterness, that I admired this she did or that, she would say, "What of it, we are paid for that."
Odd how often it is the same thing that people say.
When I ask of a man with the Croix de Guerre what he did to win it, he always says, "Je n'ai fait que comme les autres."
A man going back does not say to us here that he is glad to have his life to offer again for his country. But he says that thing which makes me catch my breath with pride in him. "Je veux b'en. Tous les copains sont là."
They go off like that, to those places of death that they know already, wherein they have seen things we dare not imagine, and all they say about it is that all the copains are there.
There are not many of my ward who go back, ours are the very badly wounded, the men who are out of it.
The men have done all that they could do. Every one of them did all that he could do, and kept on doing it as long as he could. And when he could do no more, why then he was out of it, and it was for others to take up and go on with. He himself was done with it. He would rather not talk about it. It had been so bad that he does not want to talk about it. He does not want to think about it any more.
He would rather talk about things that used to happen "dans le pays," about the vines or the corn, or the fishing boat with oars or with sails, and "la vieille" and "les petiots."
"It is pretty bad?" I say, perhaps, to this one or that one, when I see how he is suffering.
I have never heard one of them say, "C'est pour la France."
But what they always, always say, all of them, is a thing I think very beautiful.
"You suffer much, my child?"
"Pas trop, Madame."
Always it is, "Not too much."
But sometimes it is too much, and they cannot bear it.
And when I look at the bed that used to be his, I think of him lying there trying to smile and to say that his suffering was not too much.
And the new man in the bed says those same words, as if it were a little formula always an answer to the question I cannot help asking.
"You suffer much?"
"Not too much, Madame."
Sometimes they say, "Ca va aller mieux."
"Ca ne va pas, mon petit?"
"Ca va aller mieux."
There is only one thing that is like the things one reads of. It is that the men, when they are very, very bad, always, always call for their mothers.
I remember reading that somewhere, and thinking it was just something somebody had thought pretty to write.
But it is one of the most true and simple and beautiful things that there can be in the world.
It is strange too. When they suffer desperately, they keep saying, "My mother, my poor mother," as if it were she who suffered. They seem to be grieving for her, not for themselves.
When they are frightened they call for her. Some of them are frightened of taking chloroform. They have fought and not been afraid, they would not be afraid to die, but chloroform is different.
Joseph opens the double doors of the ward and pushes the stretcher cart in and calls the number this or that.
He is all ready and waiting.
Joseph lifts him from the bed to the cart. I double a pillow under his head and wrap the blanket over, and follow.
The doors at the other side of the hall are closed, and I run ahead to open them, and shut them behind again after the cart.
If I can make an excuse I go down the corridor and wait also at the door of the operating room. I know the men hate to wait there alone. Sometimes there is very long to wait. And Joseph has to go to do other things.
Sometimes the door of the operating room is ajar, and one can see in a little, and that is horrible. People go in and out, the doctors, and Madame Laure, fetching and carrying things. The stretcher of the man who has been taken in is left pulled back against the wall, by that of the man who is waiting his turn. I stand very close to my cart and pat the blankets.
The men like to have one wait with them. There is a thing many of them say. It is a dull thing, and touching, as sometimes dull things are. They will say, over and over, "If you were not here, I should be alone. If you were not here, I should be alone."
But when the doctors come, with the chloroform, it is only of his mother the man thinks. He says, "Oh, maman! Oh, maman!" and keeps all the time saying it till he sleeps.
The adjutant, the new Number 12, says that you can hear them calling maman all the time when they lie wounded between the trenches, wounded and one cannot get to them to pick them up. He says it is the last word they call before they are still.
The Patronne
I take off my cloak and blue veil in the patronne's room.
The patronne is usually sitting at her desk. Sometimes she says good morning to me, and sometimes she doesn't.
She used to be fille de salle in this hospital, she used to clean these stairs and corridors; then she rose to be infirmière in the ward where I work now, and then panseuse. She is a huge gaunt raw-boned sorrel-coloured woman, who looks like a war-horse. She is so alive and quick that you feel her personality stronger than anything in the hospital, than anything, you think, anywhere. I have seen her seem stronger than death—driving death away.
When Number 17 was so very ill, I think it was she who drove death away from his bed. She worked and swore, and worked and swore. It was hideous. I laugh when I remember. Afterwards I found her outside in the corridor, sitting on the bench. He was going to get well. I cried; and she swore at me till I laughed.
Big red blotches come out on her arms when she is excited, and get purple when she is tired. If you visit the hospital, you do not know what to think of her. But if you work there you admire her, and are proud when she speaks to you kindly. It is an illumined day if by chance she says to you, "Bon jour, ma crotte."
Madame Marthe Again
I don't know at all how it happens that a little white mouse of a woman of the people, who has worked and worked all her life, and never been cared for by anybody, should have beautiful hands. But Madame Marthe has beautiful hands. Her hands are small and quick and absolutely sure. They tremble when things are bad, but in spite of that they are certain and sure. They never make a mistake. And they are not afraid of anything.
Sometimes my hands are afraid to touch things, and then I am ashamed. Sometimes I pretend not to see things that are fallen on the floor, and when she picks them up, I am so ashamed.
If my two hands were poisoned so that they had to be cut off, it would not make any difference. But what would the ward do if anything happened to the hands of Madame Marthe?
The Ward—All Souls' Day
There are twenty-eight beds against the walls of the ward and ten stretcher-beds down the middle of its long clear bright length. Between the beds there is no room to push the dressing cart about, it stands close up against the apparatus of dressings.
There are some things that make stains on the whiteness of the ward. When I am away from it, I see those things standing out against the whiteness.
There is the blue of the sublimé in the glass tank of the dressing cart, and there is the green of the liqueur de Labaraque in the big jar on the apparatus.
Sometimes there will be the light blue of a képi or the dark blue of a béret against the wall, hung on the knob at the top of a bed, or the red of a Zouave's cap.
There are the black squares of the slates over the beds. I can see, as if from any distance, the words scrawled in chalk on the slates: "Amp. de la cuisse gauche et de la jambe droite au dessous du genou." "Amp. du bras droit à l'épaule," and three "Xs" for the hemorrhages. "Plaie pénétrante poumon gauche, Op. 20 IX." "Brûlures gaz enflammé visage poitrine deux bras." "Eclat d'obus dans le ventre." "11 éclats d'obus côté gauche." And on and on like that, up one side of the ward and down the other.
Besides the black slates there are the placards, pale yellow, printed and written over that something may be known about the man on the bed.
And there are the pale yellow temperature charts, with the dreadful lines of fever that zigzag up and down.
There is exactly room between the beds for the night-tables; the chairs have been put all out into the corridors and heaped up against the wall opposite the lift. Madame Bayle is annoyed because they are in the way when the linen comes up. They are to be sent to the attics as soon as any one has time to see to it. But now no one has time.
Hospital, Thursday, November 11th
The sparrows were all talking together in the trees of the great central court of the hospital.
I met Madame Bayle as usual in the first court. We almost always meet there, as I arrive and she is crossing to the store-house on the other side of the entrance. Usually we stop and stand a minute, listening to the conversation of the sparrows.
Madame Bayle is the chief of the linen-room of our pavilion. She is a dreadful fat shining shuffling person, who hates me because I wear white shoes. Also because once I made her unlock the linen-room for me to take out some things I thought were mine, and the things were not mine, and she was angry with me. She is always trying to get me into trouble to pay me back. But we both love the birds in the courtyard. When we meet in the courts these days we say to one another, "Voilà nos pauvres petits pierrots!" and are friends for a moment.
This morning I ran past. I was afraid if I stopped she might give me news of my ward.
The buildings of the second court have not been militarised. It is the pavilion of the defective children. None of the children were out in the court this morning. The lights in their rooms were still burning, it was so dark a morning; I could see some of the children making up the rows of little cots, and some of them clearing away the bowls and pitchers from the long table. There are some who always sit with their hands in their laps and their heads hanging. They have dreadful little faces. Some of the children can do lessons a little, and some of them seem quite bright, and play always the same game, hands around in a ring, in a corner of the refectory.
The third court is for the wounded of our service. The recreation-room and various offices and kitchens open on to it, and the windows of the two storeys of wards look over it.
The lift was down, and Cordier called to me; but I ran past, and up the two flights of stairs, away from him as from Madame Bayle.
Cordier had been given charge of the lift. He is one of the wounded in the face. It is not his eyes. It is the lower part of his face. They are beginning to take off some of the bandages. He did not mind so much while the bandages quite hid it. But now he minds dreadfully. This morning I hated dreadfully the sounds he made calling to me. They say he will never be able to speak distinctly again. I was afraid he would be hurt because I ran by. But I would have known from his eyes if what I had dreaded had happened in my ward.
I took off my things in the patronne's bureau, and went across the passage to the door of the ward where I help every day with the surgical dressings.
It is always strange to open the door of the ward when one first comes on. So much may have happened in the night.
I stood outside the door. The door has glass panes that are washed over with white paint so one cannot see through. There are places where the paint has not held at the edges, and one can stoop and look in.
I could not see the bed of Number 29 from there, but I would know from the look of the men in the ward.
As I stooped, the patronne came out from the chief's bureau.
I heard her step and turned.
She said, "He is very bad. If they amputate he will probably die of the shock. It will have to be the left leg too, at the thigh. It is you who must tell him. If they do not do it he will die of poisoning certainly."
She stamped her foot at me and said, "Now don't look like that. You've got to tell him. He will take it better from you." The blotches of her arms were very purple. She said, "They are going to do it this morning. Go and tell him." Then she went back into the chief's bureau.
I went into the ward. I still could not see the Number 29 because of the hoop, like a little tent, that keeps the weight of the blankets from his legs.
Madame Marthe, the panseuse, was not in the ward. The infirmière, Madame Alice, was cleaning the night-tables down by the other door.
Every one called, "Bonjour, Madame; bonjour, Madame!"
"Bonjour, les embusqués!"
That is our great joke, that they are all embusqués.
I went across to Number 29 and looked at him over the hoop.
He was lying with his eyes wide open. They are like the eyes of deer and oxen. He is a very big man, very ugly, with an old scar over half of his face. Such an ugly, funny face; the shadow of death has no right to be upon such a ridiculous face. His face was made for making people laugh. He always kept the whole ward laughing. He used to make me laugh in the midst of his horrible pansements. No matter what he suffered, he never used to make a sound. I almost cannot bear it when they suffer silently. If they scream, I really don't care much. He used to try to wink at me to make me laugh.
I knew this about him, that his people are woodcutters in the mountains between the valleys of the Maurienne and the Tarentaise. I do not know why he went away to strange new countries. He must be thirty-five years old. In wildernesses he heard of the war three months after it began. He was wounded seven months ago, and was sent from hospital to hospital, getting always worse. He is not the sort of creature to be in a hospital. He looks absurd in a bed. He used to tell me of throwing one's blanket over a heap of pine boughs and sweet fern. He had much fever, and he would tell me about the clear, cool, perfect water of a certain forest spring.
I thought, standing there, how he would be wanting to drag himself into some hole of rocks and great tree-trunks, where no one saw.
The clock was striking eight. They would not begin to operate before ten. He would have to think of it for two hours, lying there. He looked at me very steadily. I thought, "It is I who must tell him, it is I who must tell him." He tried to wink at me, and then he shut his eyes. I thought, "I will wait a little."
I went to the apparatus in the middle of the ward and began to get things ready for the panseuse.
I tried to talk to the men in the beds near, the 9, Barbet, whose fever had gone down nicely; and 10, the pepère, who has had his right hand amputated; and 6 and 7 opposite, who are both young and gay and getting well fast. But I could not talk.
He is only one of thousands and thousands. In the hospitals, in the dreadful fields, along the roads, they are dying.
Those of the men who could sit up and use their hands were folding compresses.
Twenty-one started a song and some of the others took it up. They sing softly, many of them have very nice voices.