Journal of Small Things

I got everything ready on the dressing-table. I kept all the time looking at the clock. Every few minutes I passed where I could see Number 29. He lay always with his eyes shut. Madame Alice had finished her cleaning and had gone to tidy up. Madame Marthe would come back and we would have to begin the dressings.

When I was unrolling the big cotton, I felt sure, suddenly, that 29 was waiting for me. It was odd, for I could not see him round the hoop; I went to him.

His eyes were open and he tried to say something. His mouth was black with fever.

I leaned down close.

I was thinking, "I've got to tell him."

But he said, "Don't worry, I know."

I stood there and I did not say anything. I did not even look at him. I looked quite away out of the windows to the treetops and the blue roofs and the wet close sky.

He lay perfectly still, and I just stood there.

The men went on singing—

Madame Marthe had come in and was going about her work. She did not call me. It was nice of her not to call me.

She is quick and very clever and nervous and bad-tempered. She is rather horrid for me usually, but to-day she has been so nice that I shall always remember.

She went on with the dressings. I stood quite silently by the bed of 29.

After a while the chief came in with the patronne and all the doctors. They came to Number 29 Madame Marthe came, and I left her with them. They talked for a few minutes with her and then went out.

I helped her get him ready, and then Joseph came with the stretcher.

I went with him down the corridor to wait at the door of the operating room. They give the chloroform usually at the door. It seemed dreadfully long.

I said, "You don't mind my waiting with you, do you? I'd like to."

It was such a silly thing to say that he tried to laugh at me.

I thought they would give him the chloroform here at the door of the operating room and that I would run when he was once under. But they threw open the doors, and wheeled the stretcher cart in, and called to me to help lift him to the table. And then to help with this, with that, quickly. And I stayed and helped through it all. They thought he was going to die there on the table. Afterwards I realized how horrible it had been. When we got back to the ward, the patronne was there with Madame Marthe.

The patronne is a wonderful nurse. If any one can get a man through it, she can. She is dreadful. She screams from one end of the ward to the other and stamps her foot, and uses hideous words. But she can storm a man back into life. And suddenly all the rage will be a coaxing, and you know that she cares about it. "J'ai cela dans la peau," she says.

She shouted the "cinq lettres" at me, "What are you staring at? Get on with your work. He's through that, and he's not going to die."

Number 14
Sunday, December 5th

The mother of little 14, Louis, has come to see him.

When I came into the ward this morning, I was frightened to see that there were people about the bed of little Louis.

I don't know why we always call him little Louis, for he is a great long boy as he lies there in his bed; he must have stood splendidly tall and strong before.

But it was only that Madame Marthe and Madame Alice were standing there, talking with a tall fine woman, who wore the black shawl and small black ribbon cap of the country of Arles. The shawl and the cap gave to the mother of little Louis that special dignity the peasant costume always gives, oddly touching in the lonely city and in this huge strange house of grief.

She was sitting quietly by the bed of little Louis in the corner, talking to him and smiling, and talking to the nurses.

Little Louis was smiling with big tears rolling down his cheeks.

Madame Alice had the pail of dirty water on the floor beside her and stood leaning on the handle of her mop. She is a big well-built woman, handsome and sullen. She is sullen even when she does kind things. You would not believe that she was kind. She had her skirt pinned up to her knees and wore the huge wooden sabots she always puts on when she scrubs the floors.

Madame Marthe stood cleaning her nails with the pansement scissors. She had not yet put on her cap with the black streamers and the ribbon of three colours. She has great coils of pale hair.

Once she said to me, "I suppose you wear a hat in the street?" I said, "Usually." And she said, "I would not wear a hat if I went to see a king."

She and Madame Alice and the mother of little Louis were all laughing together over our especial joke, that Louis will be very wicked as soon as he is a little better, and will make us great trouble in the ward.

Louis' father died two months ago, and Louis does not know. He is so ill that he cannot be allowed to know. His mother had to answer all his questions about home, and explain that his father had not been able to come because it was lambing time. She had to smile, and make it seem that everything was going well in the house that little Louis would never see again. She had to make it seem as if the patronne had not told her that little Louis was dying.

He would have liked to have had her left alone with him. But she was grateful when one or another of us found a minute to come and stand there and smile also.

Monday, December 6th

In the cold, rainy, windy early morning there was a regiment of infantry, with all its camping things, battle things, marching across the Place de la Bastille, going out.

Long blue coat and blue-covered képi, blanket rolled up in a big wheel, knapsack and cartridge-belt, flask and drinking-cup, bayonet and gun.

And each man had a bit of mimosa or a few violets or a little tight hard winter rosebud buttoned into his coat, or stuck in his képi, or in the muzzle of his gun.

I think most of one smart young officer, who had three roses in his hand. They were not the sad little roses that the south sends to the winter streets of Paris, but great full hothouse crimson roses.

He carried his roses in his left hand, held a little before him, that nothing might touch them, stiffly, and looked straight ahead of him as he marched.

A woman, standing beside me to watch them go, said to me, "They are so young."

She had a grey shawl over her head.

The band passed. I do not know what it was playing.

The woman and I stood together to watch those boys go away.

Madame Alice
Thursday, December 9th

These last days Madame Alice has been even more sullen than usual. She arrives in the morning, they tell me—she arrives at six and I am never there to see—with a long face, and will say good day to nobody, and grumbles because somebody's handkerchief, or somebody's bag of raffia grasses, or somebody's package of letters, had fallen from his night-table to litter her floor. She grumbles about "pigs," and bangs things.

When I arrive I find her still grumbling and banging.

This morning she was washing the face of the new 25. She washed his poor face very gently, no hands in the world could have been kinder or more careful than hers, or more delicate of touch, though they are big and red, but she was grumbling all the time.

I said, "Good morning," and she hunched one shoulder.

Madame Marthe came in and said that I had better go and fetch my boiled water before somebody else emptied the boiler.

When I was coming back with it from the office, Madame Alice was standing by the window at the turn of the passage. She had put her pail down on the floor, with 25's soap and things thrown down beside it. She stood with one arm against the window-pane and her face buried in the crook of her elbow.

I said, "Oh, Madame Alice, are you ill, Madame Alice?"

She hunched her shoulder. I put my big pitcher down by her pail on the floor, and patted her shoulder and said, "Please, oh, please."

She said, not turning or raising her head, "They've taken him to the children's hospital—Jeanjean, my little boy, you know; he has been very ill all the week. A neighbour said, five days ago, she would take him to the Clinique, there is no hour when I can get away from here to take him. It was the neighbour who looked after him the day they sent him home from school because he was sick. She is very good, but she has not much time. She has got her work. She did not know how ill he was. I told her, the first day, to take him to the Clinique, but that day she had no time. She did not tell me. She told me that at the Clinique they said it was nothing. She told me that every day. For five days she did not take him. I only saw him in the nights, you know. Oh, it is horrible when you can only see them at night."

She stopped a minute and was sobbing, but without making any noise. She rubbed the tears out of her eyes against the back of her hand, and went on. It was odd to hear her talk so much, like that—she whom I only knew as sullen and silent.

"It is nearly eight at night when I get home," said she, "and I have to leave soon after five in the morning. I was up with him all the nights, and I was so frightened all the days. Oh, these days here!"

She stood always with her back turned, and I could only stand there, patting her shoulder. It was queer how such big sobs made no noise at all.

She said, "The neighbour got frightened yesterday, and took him to the Clinique, and they said it was spinal-meningitis, and sent him then, at once, to the children's hospital. When I got home he was gone. It was night, they would not have let me see him at the hospital. This morning I had to come here. But I shall get off at noon and go to him for an hour."

She shook herself and jerked away from me.

"Now do you see?" she said, "now do you see?"

And without saying what it was she meant she took up her pail, and 25's little bundle of things, and went on along the corridor.

Saturday, December 11th

To-day I have been seeing the little old curé of Jadis-sur-Marne. I found out, after all this time, where he was; and went and sat with him for an hour, in a pleasant sunny room of the house where they take care of him. He did not know me at first, but afterwards he seemed quite pleased. I want to tell this story of him.

One Sunday, months and months and ages and ages and ages ago, Monsieur le Curé of Jadis-sur-Marne, began his discourse in a wrath righteous indeed. It was the Sunday that nobody knew was to be the last Sunday of peace.

"My dear brethren," began Monsieur le Curé, in his most angry voice. He snapped the words out, "Mes chers frères," as if each word were a little sharp stone shot out of a sling to sting the upturned faces of his listeners. "My dear brethren," he began in righteous wrath, and stopped short.

He stood in a bar of dust and sun motes, up in the old black carved pulpit, against the grey stone pillar. Then he was a round, jolly, rosy, busy old little curé, who got into a temper only reluctantly, after much goading.

His church was old and beautiful and quite large. There were twenty-one people in it: ten in the château chapel, opposite the pulpit, Madame la Marquise and Mademoiselle and two guests in the great red-velvet chairs, and six of the servants in the benches behind them; old Ernestine, the curé's bonne, in her round white cap, erect, determined to stop awake; another white cap or two, here and there, and Père Pate's black skull-cap; two secularized sisters from the Ecole Libre, awkward in their black hats and jackets; three little wriggling girls whom they had managed to capture and retain on the bench between them; some small boys down by the door; and Madelon, the twelve-year-old daughter of the château gardener, who forsook the château pew that she might sit nearer to Monsieur le Curé.

Madelon sat twisted round in her chair to look straight up at him and adore, her hands in their Sunday gloves clasped intensely upon her blueprint lap.

It was cool in the church after the last day's rain, and dark, except where bars of sunshine and dancing sun motes struck across, and where the altar candles were little stars.

One heard the chickens cackling in the curé's garden, and the locusts shrilling close at the windows in the acacia trees of the cemetery, and the children calling and laughing in the street.

"My dear brothers," began Monsieur le Curé, looking down into the round blue eyes of Madelon.

He clutched the edge of the pulpit in both hands and leaned forward. It was indeed tremendously that he was going to scold. He had a right to scold. All night, in his little brown room, under the snores of old Ernestine, he had been working himself up to the pitch for it.

Next Sunday was the Fête of the Patronage. The Grand Vicaire was to come, all the way from Meaux. Madame la Marquise was to present a banner.

The children romped in the street. The women put on hats and went and stood and gossiped in the market-place. The men went fishing; the boys went fishing.

Every Sunday it was the same thing.

In a high temper, Monsieur le Curé began, "My dear brothers," and stopped short.

He let go of the pulpit edge and stood straight and looked over the heads of the twenty-one of them. All the light there was in the deep old church seemed to be upon his face.

When he looked down at his people, it was with a lovely shining of kindliness. It was as if, suddenly, he realized how he loved them. He loved them too much to scold.

"My dear brothers," he said. All the words became little kind caresses. They were small humble words, poor little words, simple, like his listeners. They seemed to have the touch of many little wings across the faces lifted up, or to fall like showers of blossom petals.

One day, only so little a time afterwards, Monsieur le Curé stood among a heap of charred things and broken, blackened stones.

This is what used to be the pillar of the pulpit, and under all that, at the end there, must be buried the altar, with the cross and the candles that used to be stars. There are things that are burned, all black and charred, and things that are twisted. The curé cannot make out what they are. He had not known that there was iron in the church. Queer iron things are twisted and tortured. The new bright window he had thought so beautiful is all broken, the reds and blues and yellows sparkle among the stones.

There are men's boots. What are men's boots doing here, sticking up straight out of the ruins of altars?

They are the boots of the dead men. Those things among the stones are dead men. You go to see what the boots are doing here, and you find that the blue-and-red heaps are dead men.

How they sink into the earth! They are trying to get back into the earth, whence they came. They came from it and are trying to get back, as fast as they can, into it.

This was once a church. And once upon a time, ages and ages ago, or only some days and days ago, Monsieur le Curé stood against the pillar and began to scold.

The women used to stand and gossip in the market-place; the children used to romp in the cobbled street; the men used to go fishing.

The graveyard about this heap of stones, that once was a church, is a strange place, full of trampled straw, and of long heaps of red and blue, that end in boots. The walls of the graveyard are everywhere pierced with holes, that often those long heaps lie under. Monsieur le Curé does not know why the straw is there.

And so Monsieur le Curé has become a little mad.

In one of those days, it seems, he came across Madelon sitting against a wall, quite dead. It was in the rue du Château. Much of the wall was fallen down, but just where Madelon sat the bit of it standing was radiant with roses. Madelon sat on the grass against the wall, her legs stuck straight out, her hands on the grass, her head hanging forward, tangled hair over her staring eyes, and her mouth wide open.

The curé says he does not know what it was that happened to Madelon.

By the fire, in a bright room, Monsieur le Curé talked to me of the church that Sunday morning, and made me see it; and made me see, as if I stood there that other day with him, the broken things, and black, twisted things, and the things that the earth was taking back. He talked quietly, even of Madelon, and said he was so glad that, that last time, God had not let him scold.

The last Sunday of Peace: Remembering July 26th, 1914

When they came back from Mass, up through the château woods and the park and across the gardens, Anne Marie and Raoul walked together, and Anne Marie knew how happy she was.

She had been happy every day of her eighteen years, but that day she realized it.

Before she was quite awake she had been happy because of birds and church bells and sunshine and the fragrances of the garden. Snuggled down in the pillows that smelled of rose petals, she was happy because of her new white dress and the poppy hat. And as she waked she had known that she was happy apart from all those things, those lovely accustomed things, and far, far beyond them, because of Raoul. Because Raoul would be waking there, under the same roof. Because he would be waiting for her when she went down the stairs in the white dress and poppy hat.

He had been waiting at the foot of the stairs. He had had a huge box of white orchids sent out for her from Paris.

He had gone to Mass with her and his mother, and her mother. She had sat three chairs away from him in the dusk of the château chapel.

After Mass the two mothers walked ahead together, and she and Raoul followed close behind, more nearly alone together than they had ever been before.

He talked all the time; and she dimpled and blushed and was happy, and knew that she was happy, but could not say a word.

They went slowly through the woods, where there were quantities of orange toadstools after the rain, and all the birds were singing; and along the avenues of the park, and across the stiff gardens.

Anne Marie's father was out on the terrace. He was walking up and down the terrace and gesturing very strangely all by himself as he walked.

Across the sunny spaces of lawn and gravel, box border and clipped yew and flowers, the château was all sunlit, its steep blue roofs and old soft yellow walls.

Anne Marie's father came down the terrace steps to meet her mother and Raoul's mother, and, as they stood together he seemed to be telling them something.

Anne Marie thought how odd of him to gesture like that. Suddenly a wonderful idea and daring came to Anne Marie. She stopped and stood still there in the little gravel path, between the box edges and beds of roses and heliotrope and petunias that were so sweet in the sunshine. She found herself possessed of a great courage. She would stand there, and Raoul would stand there, and they would be quiet, quite alone together. And she would dare to talk to him. She would dare to tell him things. There were so many things for her to tell and ask. Everything of life and of loving. She thought the droning of the bees was a hot and golden sound. It was the greatest, happiest, most wonderful moment of all her life.

But Raoul said, "Shall we not go on, Anne Marie; there is something the matter, shall we not go on and see what it is?"

His mother had turned around where she stood at the top of the steps and was looking at Raoul.

The grey stone flags of the terrace were scattered over with all the Paris papers, that Anne Marie's father must have thrown down, and trampled on as he walked up and down the terrace.

He said to Raoul, coming up the steps, "Well, this time it is certain. Whatever they try to show, every word in the papers means it. It will be inside the week, it is I who tell you."

"Raoul, Raoul," said Raoul's mother, very white.

But Raoul, up the steps in two bounds, did not hear her. "If only it may be! How we've hoped it! Oh, sir, do you really think it?"

Anne Marie's mother had put her parasol and Mass book down on the broad stone balustrade of the terrace. She stooped over and took up one of the papers that lay on the flags.

"It can't be," she said, reading. She spread the paper out on the top of the balustrade and stood pulling off her gloves as she read. "It can't be," she said again, pulling off first one soft grey glove and then the other.

"It can't be," said Raoul's mother, always looking at Raoul.

Anne Marie's father, beginning to pace the terrace again, said, "It will be, it will be!"

Raoul said, "It's got to be," standing very straight and looking at nobody.

Anne Marie thought, oh dear, oh dear, now they will talk and talk; and she had so wanted Raoul to stay with her down in the garden.

Cantine, Christmas

All the babies seem to me to be blonde and of exactly the same size and quite square, about one year old, square, and very adorable. I never can remember which are the boys and which the girls.

The mothers come from, we don't know where; and are, we don't know what.

Last year there was written on a card and posted on the wall by the door, a thing that I think rather beautiful—

"Toute femme enciente, ou qui nourrit son enfant, peut venir tous les jours prendre ici ses repas de midi et du soir, sans craindre aucune question."

They came, at noon and at dusk, sick, ugly, stupid things, twice a day like that, from two hundred and fifty to three hundred of them. Bearing the children of soldiers, the children that will be France, they came without need of more than making each of them her X in the book on the shelf by the door.

There is not room for more than forty-five at a time at the tables in the room that used to be a butcher's shop. They had to wait in turn outside in the street.

Outside in the ugly, forlorn street they waited, an ugly, forlorn line, in wind or rain.

They all seemed frightened, not of the things that there really were to fear, like sickness and poverty and war, but of just opening the door and coming in and making their mark in the book, and finding places at the tables.

They would have the door always kept shut. The steam of the soup was thick and horrid, always, in the room. I hate the smell of the poor. I hated those deformed, bedraggled, dulled women, as I served their soup. I hated them, because they would have the door kept shut. But I loved them, because their children would be France.

This year we keep Christmas for the babies.

It is odd how beautiful any woman is with a baby in her arms. Especially if she has only a shawl to wrap around herself and the baby, where it lies in the hollow of her arm. The faded, stained, worn shawl, drawn close about her head, falls in long lines down over her shoulders, and is gathered up in new folds around the nestling baby, the little soft shape of it, the little head, round, against her throat.

Like that each one of the women makes you think of a beautiful, wonderful thing.

Perfectly Well

The patronne was standing by the bed of little 10.

I said, "It does not go well, little 10?"

He said, "Not too well, madame." His poor face was twitching, and his poor hands on the sheet.

The patronne said to me, "He has given us a bad night, that sort of a horror there." She stood with her hands purple on her broad hips and looked at him, and said, "Espèce d'horreur, veux-tu finir de nous en m——"

He laughed and I laughed.

It is dreadful, but I can bear it better like that. The little good sisters of other, different hospitals, the ladies of the Red Cross, the calm and tenderness and prayers, how strange it would seem.

Little 10 laughed.

"Oh, you laugh!" said the patronne, "and all the trouble you make us! Wait till you are well!" She said, "Attends que tu sois guéri, et je te f——trai un coup sur le citron."

Madame Marthe came with the hypodermic syringe and tubes and glasses in a basin. Her hands were trembling. I love her when her hands tremble.

The patronne said to me, "He is off for another little party of billiards."

That meant another operation.

I said, "You don't mind, little 10?"

He said, "Not too much, madame."

I said, "You'll be better to-morrow."

He said, "I'll be better to-morrow."

"Name of God," said the patronne, "of course he'll be better to-morrow."

Next day, when I tried not to cry because his bed was empty, she said to me, "It was no lie: he is better, isn't he?"

Hospital, New Year's Day, 1916

What made me dreadfully want to cry was that they all, every one of them, wished me good health—little Louis, who is dying, and all the rest of them.

The Apache Baby—Wednesday, January 5th—Cantine

They telephoned from the cantine that the baby of the girl Alice was dead at the hospital, and that the funeral was to be from there that afternoon at three o'clock, and that Alice wanted me to come.

Mademoiselle Renée, the économe, who telephoned, said it was the apache girl with the ear-rings.

I don't know why she wanted me to come to the funeral of her baby. Of the nearly three hundred women who came twice every day to the cantine, she had never been especially my friend. Her baby had been a sick little thing, and I had been touched by her wild love of it. It had no father, she told me. We never ask questions at the cantine, but she had been pleased to tell me that. She had said she was glad, because, so, it was all her own. She had rocked it as she held it wrapped in the folds of her red shawl, and shaken her long bright ear-rings, laughing down at it, over her bowl of soup. And now it is dead.

Claire came to me. We had just time, if we took a taxi, to get to the hospital, stopping on the way for some flowers. It was raining more or less, and very dark.

At the hospital they sent us round to the back, to a sort of shed opening on a street that was being built up, or had been torn down, I don't know which, desolate in the rain.

In the room of the shed there were two families in black, two mothers with dingy crape veils, and two dead babies in unpainted pine boxes that were open.

The baby in the box on the right was quite big, the size of the most expensive doll one could get for a rich little girl at Christmas. There was a quite fine white tin wreath on the floor, tilted up against the pine box. The family of the bigger baby was quite numerous, half a dozen women, an old man, and several children. They all had shoes, and several of the women had umbrellas, and one of them had a hat.

In the smaller box was the baby of Alice, very, very small and pinched and blue, even more small and pinched and blue than when she used to bring it to the cantine. The family of Alice consisted of a small boy with bare feet and no hat, a small girl with a queer coloured skirt and felt slippers and a bit of black crape over her red hair, and a boy of perhaps seventeen, also in felt slippers, with his coat collar turned up and a muffler round his chin and his cap dragged down over his eyes. Alice had a hat and a crape veil and a black coat and skirt, and down-trodden, shapeless shoes much too big for her.

There was a small bunch of violets in the pine box with the baby.

We put our roses down on the floor at the foot of the box.

Both babies had on the little white slips that the hospital gives.

The family of the bigger baby, and the brother and sister of Alice, stared at us.

The mother of the bigger baby stood leaning against the wall, her head against the whitewash, her two hands over her eyes. She was making a queer little noise through her teeth. She kept it up all the time we were in the shed, a sort of hissing. She never once uncovered her eyes.

Alice was standing close, close beside her baby in the pine box, just looking down at it. She never took her eyes from it. She is a tall, straight girl, but she was bent over, as if she were feeble and old. Her veil was pushed back from her face. It had been wet, and the black had run over her face. But it must have been the rain, for she was not crying at all. All the time in the shed she never moved or cried at all.

Her little brother and sister stood back as if they were afraid of her.

Claire and I waited near the door of the shed.

For a long time we waited like that.

Then two croquemorts came, in their shining black clothes. One of them had a sort of hammer in his hand.

They went to the box of the bigger baby, and one of them picked up the cover of the box and put it on, and the other began to drive the nails in.

When he drove the first nail in, the woman with her eyes covered so she could not see him, heard, and knew what it was, and began to shriek. With her hands over her eyes she stood against the wall and shrieked.

The croquemort drove in all the nails, and the woman kept on shrieking.

Then the other croquemort put the tin wreath on the lid of the box, and then both of them came over to our baby.

Alice had been just looking and looking at her baby. When the men came, and one of them took up the lid of the box from the floor, and the other stood with his hammer, she gathered herself up as if she would spring upon the men who would take her little dead thing from her and put it away for ever. I thought she would fight over it, quite mad. The little brother and sister stood away from her, shivering.

But what she did was to stoop and take up our roses from where they lay on the floor, and put them into the pine box with the baby. She put them all in about the baby, covering it with them. She hid it away under roses and then stood close, close to it, while the croquemort drove the nails in, all the nails, one by one.

Then one of the croquemorts took up the box of the bigger baby and carried it out of the shed and put it, with the tin wreath on the top of it, into a hearse that there was waiting on the left of the door. And the other croquemort took up the box of Alice's baby and carried it out, and put it into a hearse that was waiting on the right of the door.

The family of the bigger baby followed away, after the hearse and one of the croquemorts, toward the depths of the city, two of the women leading the baby's mother, who still kept her hands over her eyes, but was not shrieking any more, only sobbing. I know no more of them after that.

Alice went out of the door alone, and turned to the right, after the hearse in which was her dead child.

Our croquemort would have gone ahead of her, but she would not let him pass. She would not have him between her and her baby. She kept close, close to the hearse, almost touching it, all the way.

The croquemort walked behind her, and the brothers and sister walked behind him, and Claire and I at the end of it.

We went through, a tangle of poor streets, narrow and crowded. People drew back out of our way; some of them crossed themselves, and all of them were silent for an instant as the apache baby passed.

We went through wide, forlorn streets of coal yards and warehouses and factories. The carters and labourers in those streets stopped to look at us and make the sign of the Cross, for the baby passing.

We went over the canal bridge and the railroad bridges, and along desolate streets of the outskirts, all in the rain.

We went by barracks, where many blue coats, going about their duties, or standing idly about, drew up to salute the baby in its poor little unpainted rough box.

At the fortifications many blue coats were digging trenches, and they all looked up and stopped their work to salute the baby.

Twice we met groups of blue coats marching along the muddy empty roads, and both times the officer halted his men to salute the apache baby going by.

The bigger brother walked like a true apache, slouching and slinking along, shoulders hunched up, head sunk down, face hidden between his muffler and the peak of his cap. The smaller brother and the sister slouched too. But Alice walked quite straight, her head up, close, close to her child.

So we came to the cemetery, in at the gates, and along a street of little marble houses, to a field where there were only wooden and black iron crosses, and to a hole that was dug in the red wet earth.

There was a man waiting for us by the hole. He helped the croquemort to take the box out of the hearse and put it in the hole.

Alice stood close, close to the edge, looking down into the grave.

The rest of us stood together behind her.

The croquemort gave her a little spade, and told her what to do with it.

Then she stooped down and dug up a spadeful of earth and threw it into the hole where they had put the box.

Each of us went in turn to give earth to earth, and then it was over.

Alice stood close, close to the edge of the hole, and looked and looked down into it.

The croquemort said something to Alice, but she did not move. He then spoke to the bigger brother, who shuffled up to Alice and tugged at her sleeve.

But still she did not move.

The smaller brother began to cry.

Then the sister went to Alice and pulled at her other sleeve.

"Take her away," the croquemort said to me.

I said, "Dear, we must go."

Without looking at me, she said, "I—I stay here." She stood close, close to the hole and looked at the little pine box, and said again, quite quietly, "I stay here."

I said, "You cannot stay," stupidly, as if we were discussing any ordinary coming or going.

Her little sister, pulling at her skirt, said, "Say then, ask thou the lady to let thee go to supper at the cantine."

"The cantine is for those who have babies," Alice answered. Then she looked at me for the first time, her great wild eyes, in her face that was stained and streaked where the black from the wet crape had run.

Gégène's Croix de Guerre, One Thursday

When Gégène went to the Invalides to receive his Croix de Guerre, in the great Court of Honour, there was no one to go with him except Madame Marthe and me.

Gégène belongs to nobody. He is an "enfant de l'Assistance Publique." There is nobody nearer to him than the peasants he was hired out to work for, somewhere down in Brittany.

I do not know whether or not they were kind to him, whether or not they cared about his going off to war, or would take interest in the honours he has won. We know nothing but what the Assistance knows about him; and he himself can tell us nothing, for he cannot speak at all. His wound was in the head; he has been trepanned twice. He may live a long time, he is such a strong young boy, but he will never be able to speak. His right side is stiffened, he cannot use that hand, and the foot drags. Except for that, and not being able to speak, he is quite well.

Nobody knows how much he understands of it all, or what he thinks and feels. Sometimes he looks very sad. His boyish face, refined by pain, haunts me when I am away from the hospital. But sometimes he seems quite content, happy to be just well housed and fed and petted by us. We do not know what will become of him when he can no longer stay in the hospital.

Madame Marthe says, "What would you have? he is not the only one."

But she is very kind to him, and when she has a half-day's leave she often takes him out with her, for a little treat.

She and I hurried through the dressings this morning and had everything done, our cylinders sent to the sterilization, the apparatus in order, the ward quite neat, in time to go and have lunch, the three of us together, in a big café of the Boulevards.

Gégène was too excited to eat, and so was little Madame Marthe, in her cap of the "Ville de Paris" and her blue woollen shawl. She had to leave it for me to cut up Gégène's chicken and pour his red wine for him.

It rained; the crowd in the Place des Invalides stood under dripping umbrellas.

In the Court of Honour the arcades were packed with wet people, and out in the great central space there was no shelter but umbrellas for the poor great splendid heroes like Gégène.

There they all stood together, those who could stand, in all the pride and tragedy of their crutches and their bandages—one little blinded officer with his head cocked sideways like a bird's. And those who could not stand had chairs and benches; two or three were there on stretchers.

There was a group of women in deep mourning,—some of them with children—who had come to receive the decorations of their dead husbands or sons.

There were the great men of the General Staff,—maybe the Minister of War, maybe the President, maybe the Generalissimo himself—with all their high officers around them, already arrived, near the entrance, astir with preparation.

Out in the centre of the Court, grouped almost motionlessly, were the men who waited to receive their honours.

We could see our Gégène, standing up very tall and straight among them.

"Isn't he nice?" I said to Madame Marthe, "Isn't he nice?"

But Madame Marthe was crying—funny little tears, and her nose very red. "Oh!" she said, "Oh, what will happen when that man with the gold braid comes to Gégène? He will speak to Gégène, and Gégène cannot answer! He will hold out his hand to Gégène, and Gégène will not be able to take it!"

We clutched each other in panic, and then the music broke out into all the splendour of the Marseillaise.

Empty Memories

Seventeen months after the day when he went out for the first time, he was killed beside his mitrailleuse.

He had been home in the meanwhile twice on leave, and there had been nothing changed. He had won many honours, and she supposed the other woman had been proud of him. For herself she had seen him very little and always pleasantly. She was glad now that it had been only pleasantly.

But it was the day of that first August, the day of his first going, that one day, that one hour, she kept living again and again through. It kept being present with her, curiously.

He had arrived—he had telegraphed—about four of the afternoon, she did not know from where. He would have to leave again before five o'clock. She knew, of course, with whom he had been. She thought, waiting for him, what an irony that it should be like this, after all the bitterness, he was coming back to her, and to the old house of his people, in the street of many gardens.

She thought it would be awkward for them both. What could they say to one another?

She wondered if it had been terrible to him to leave the other woman. Probably the other woman was beautiful. All those women were beautiful. She thought, perhaps that other woman loved him and cared what happened to him.

Her two little boys were playing in the room.

The great closed rooms, to which she had brought them back hurriedly from the seaside, fascinated them.

The bigger little one, in his sailor suit with the huge collar was saying, "That's the old witch's cave, Toto, in the snow mountain."

The smaller one, with the curls and the Russian blouse, said, "Oh, Zizi!"

"Yes; and, Toto, that big lump is the giant, sleeping."

"Oh, Zizi!"

Then their father came.

The little boys hung back and stared at him; they never had known him really well.

Their mother stood up and went to meet him, across the wide room. "You've had a horrid journey," she said.

"I've been fifty hours in the train," he answered. "Hallo, small boys, there!"

"Toto," said Zizi, "he's going to be a soldier!"

"Oh, Zizi!" said Toto.

The bigger boy came over to his father. "I know a chap," he said, "it's the son of a friend of mademoiselle's, whose father is dead and cannot be a soldier."

"Poor chap," said his father.

His wife said, "Old Denis has got your things together. All the other men-servants are gone. He has put you something to eat on the dining-room table."

He said, "Will you come with me, do you mind? I've things to say to you, and there is so little time."

But when they sat together at one corner of the big shining table, he did not seem to know what to say. He tried to eat, but it seemed as if he could not eat. He pushed the plate away and leaned his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.

She thought she would like to do something for him, but did not know what to do. Again she said, "It must have been dreadful in the train."

"It was wonderful," he said. Then, sitting still with his face hidden, he went on: "We were singing all the time. Wherever the train stopped people gave us flowers; the whole train was full of flowers, you know. They were most of them boys of the young classes in the train. We sang the most absurd things—nursery rhymes, and old cannons, 'Frères Jacques' and 'Cœur de Lise,' and those, you know. What is the one about 'Papa Lapin'? None of us could remember the one about 'Papa Lapin,' you know."

"I don't know," she replied. It had always annoyed her, his trick of saying, "You know." She sat playing with something on the table.

He said again, "The whole train was full of flowers. 'Papa Lapin,' 'Papa Lapin'—how irritating, you know, when one can't remember."

He sat up suddenly erect, and said, "You'll take the boys and go down to the old place and look after things. It has always bored you, but after all it is for Zizi. And be good to my mother, will you, though you don't like her—she, she remembers '70. And I've not been of much use to her. I've not been of much use to you, nor to any one." He stopped short.

It was odd that suddenly she, who never had thought much about him, or felt things at all about him, should have known this thing. She had known as she sat there with him, alone in the dining-room, by the untouched things on the table, that he never would come back. He was one of those who never come back.

Hospital

Often I am sad because I cannot worry enough about the 11, Charles. I forget him even when I am in the ward. His is the bed I see first when I look through the holes of the paint in the glass-topped door, opposite, away at the far end of the ward. There he has been, always, every day, through all the endless months since the Marne, propped up against a table board and two pillows and a sheet of black rubber. He breathes always more and more painfully, and coughs always more and more. The fever lines on his chart zigzag up and down, in long dreadful points. He has become very cross and exacting. He scolds us in little feeble gasps, with little feeble gestures. He is twenty-one years old, and has very long eyelashes.

Yesterday when I went to say good-bye to him at the end of the day he was crying there in his corner, quietly, all by himself. His long eyelashes were all wet. I said, "Oh, little Charles, oh, little Charles!" and kept saying it over and over, and had nothing else in all the world to say. I patted his hands, that always lie both of them together upon the strap which is fastened round the bar at the foot of the bed, by which he is sometimes able to pull himself up.

His hands are white and thin and crooked, like the roots of things that belong in the earth; while I patted his hands I was thinking that they did not seem to belong in the light and air at all.

This morning I thought, "How absurd to have brought him a little pot of cream!" A little pot of cream for a man who is dying.

Hautiquet

Hautiquet has gone back to the front. He would not let them tell me he was going. I never saw him to say good-bye. Last night, I said, as usual, "Bon soir, tout le monde, au revoir à demain!" And Hautiquet said with the rest, "A demain, Madame." He left a little package to be given to me after he was gone.

He was one of the older ones. He had been ill in the first winter with rheumatism and pleurisy. He went back and fought all summer, and all through the Champagne, and till Christmas. Then he got rheumatism again, this time in his eyes. He has been nearly blind since then, here in the hospital.

He was a clumsy peasant who never talked much. And of what he did say I could only understand about half. I did not know that he thought about me at all.

But in the little package he left for me there was an aluminum heart, made out of the aluminum from a shell. Madame Marthe says he had been nearly all the time working at it, because he had clumsy hands and could scarcely see. He had had much trouble getting the shape right. He had cut my initials on one side of it and his on the other, crookedly, because he was so nearly blind.

Jean Fernand

He had curly yellow hair and big blue eyes. He got well terribly fast. I was wishing all the time that he would take longer about it. He was so young.

His eyes were so blue, and round, and had seen all the horrors of the great retreat. The look of those things had stayed in his round young blue eyes.

He told me he was afraid of going back, but that he was glad to go because "tous les copains sont là." He said he couldn't bear to think of them there, when he was safe out of it. "It is as if they were fighting for me," he said, "and being wounded for me, and dying."

I don't know why I write of him in the past tense, for I have always the most amusing letters from him, from there. He is near Verdun. This morning I got from him a little snapshot a copain had made of him, down on all-fours in the bottom of his trench feeding a baby pig out of a bottle.

Wednesday, February 9th
Post Card

Boinet is very happy to-day. He has news of his people at last. Since he left them in the first days, all through these months and months, it has been as if they had been simply swept away out of the world.

Everything that Boinet loved was swept away by the great black wave of the war. Into what depth of the end of all things all his life has been swept away! He has been imagining and imagining. He says, all the time in the trenches he was tortured by imagining things that might have happened to his three little sisters. Boinet is twenty-two, and the three sisters were younger than he, and beautiful, he says. Odd, how one speaks always in the past tense of people whom the war has taken into its dark spaces. Boinet tells how he loved his mother, as if it were a thing of another life.

And here is his post card saying that they are all quite well, and signed by every one of them.

For nearly a year Boinet has been in the hospital, Number 16. He has troubled about his horrible burns scarcely at all, but we have thought he would go mad torturing himself with imagining things that might have happened to his people.

By means of an agency here, and the Mairie at Tourcoing, it was possible, at last, for his people to send him a post card of six lines.

It came this morning; I have had to read it to him about fifty times over.

It says that they are all very well, and for him to give news of Pierre, the husband of his sister Josette, and it is signed with all their dear, dear names, Père, Mère, Josette, Marie, Cloton.

Only it was sad, for Boinet knows that the husband of poor little Josette, married that last July was killed long ago in one of the first battles of the war.

The New 25

He is of Morocco, brown and very lonely, and always shivering with cold. He speaks scarcely any French. His great dark eyes look to one with all the sadness of the eyes of animals that are dumb. Nobody understands him. He smiles up at us, with his beautiful white teeth and his big dumb eyes, and does not understand what we are saying. He makes me little magic-lanterns out of orange rinds, and tells me long stories about them, of which I understand not a word.

Once when I went back, just for an afternoon's visit to the hospital, I was wearing a bright blue silk scarf, and he took it and held it and cried over it, and would not give it back to me. I cannot imagine of what it reminded him, why he cried, or why he loved it.

He has three tiny little wooden dolls, scarcely bigger than almonds and wonderfully carved, that he never will let us touch. Madame Marthe thinks that they are strange gods of his; but I think they represent three children, far away, in lands where skies are blue, like my scarf.

He is only slightly wounded; very soon he will have to unwrap himself from my big white woollen shawl, and go away again to battles.

And I suppose I shall never know anything more about him.

Marketing

He was standing half turned away from the others, the fat old woman in the woollen knitted shawl and a girl with a pretty brown bare head. He was holding a big market basket very carefully in both hands. I thought there was something odd about the careful way he held it and the way he stood, his head turned to one side and hanging a bit.

The old woman and the girl were talking very much about the cabbages, with the woman of the push-cart, also old and also wearing a knitted woollen shawl.

In the stir and noise of the street market the way the tall broad young soldier stood so still and silent did seem odd. And he was holding the basket with such very great care.

There was a live white goose in the basket. It kept stretching its long neck up over the rim of the basket and peering about, opening and shutting its yellow bill and hissing at people.

When the old woman and the girl had finished their discussion and selected their cabbage, they pushed the cabbage into the market basket along with the goose, and all the time the soldier held the basket carefully.

Then the old woman put her arm through one of his arms, and the girl put her arm through the other. As he turned to go where they would take him, I saw that he was blind; the wound had healed, but it was as if his eyes were closed. He very carefully let go the basket with one hand, and with the other hand, the girl's rather impatient touch on his elbow, he made a salute to where he thought the woman of the push-cart was standing, and then the old woman and the girl led him away with the basket.

Hospital

The wards of "our" floor get always all the light there is. When there is sunlight it all comes in and picks the dust motes up and sets them dancing, down steep slants and ladders. When there is wind it sobs and sings along the wards and corridors. The rain makes wide sweeps of the great windows, and mists press very close against them and get into the wards and drift there. When there was snow, in these few days the rooms were all full of its whiteness. Almost it was as if its silence were there, and its peace.

Saturday, March 5th

The night was full of great bells booming, Verdun, Verdun, Verdun. And yet there were no bells.

I never saw a darker morning come to Paris. The darkness came into the room, thick and wet and cold.

I had my breakfast by firelight.

The crows are back already in the garden; the bare black treetops were full of them this dark morning, and not one of them stirred or made a sound.

The lamps of the trams were lighted, and the lamps of the streets and quays and bridges.

The river is very high, the trees of the margins stand drowning.

The snow of these last days has stayed on in places, as yellow as fog and smoke.

In the old great beautiful courtyards of the hospital the snow is quite deep, on the roofs and ledges of red brick and grey stone, and on the huge square old cobbles, and on the black tracery of trees and bushes and of the vines along the walls.

The buds, that were soft and green last week, are black now; I was afraid to go and touch them and find them frozen hard.

The blackbird was singing. He has been back for nine days. It was dreadful in the dark and cold to hear him singing. How terrible all lovely things are become!

Same day

In the half dark I came home along the canal. In these nights, coming home from the hospital, I have learned always more and more that the canal is beautiful, curving down between its old poor black tumbling houses, under its black bridges.

To-night the few lights of the quays and of windows fell into the water of the canal, just odds and ends of gold.

I stopped and stood and looked.

It had been a bad day in my ward.

I thought, how beautiful ugly things are become!

Saturday night before Easter

The cool wet fresh smells of the garden, and of all the gardens of the quarter, come in at my wide window. It is almost midnight, the rain has stopped, and it is not cold any more. Sometimes the crows talk together from the top of the trees where their nests are, above the old low roofs my window looks across. There has been for days now, in all the rain and cold, a drift of green about the trees, the fine green mesh of a veil that seems to float, it is so bright and frail, about the black wintry tree-trunks and boughs and branches. The blackbirds came back last week to the garden.

But it is only to-night that one can believe in spring.

In the wet sky, over the roofs and chimneys, and the treetops, there are some stars that hang as big and near as lamps. At dawn perhaps the nightingale will be singing.

Easter Day

It is wonderful that spring should come on Easter Day.

One waked—and lo, winter was over and passed. There was a moment, in waking, of not being able to believe at all in unhappiness.

The nightingale was singing, the sun was coming up out of the filmy leaves of the garden, the bells of all the churches were pouring out Easter.

The river was misty in the early morning, under the sunshine, mauve and opal and blue. The trees of the quays, in their fragile leaf, seemed to drift in the mist and sunshine. I could not tell if the trees were gold or green in the Tuileries gardens. They were quite golden against the long purple mass of the Louvre, and quite golden up the river, where there is an especially bright blur of them under the purple towers and gable of Notre Dame.

The Halles were full of country and spring.

My own poor ugly canal had colours and lines of spring about it; its dingy, dark old houses were lifted into a sky so lovely that they seemed to have become quite lovely too, and its water, under the poor bridges, was full of gold and blue and purple and deep shining.

All the birds were singing in the great courtyards of the hospital, and all the opening buds sang too, and the green, green grass in its close bindings of stone.

Cordier—his face again bandaged, for he has been worse of late—tried to tell me something. I could make out, Nouveaux, Verdun, chez vous, très grands blessés," and then there was to open the door upon the ward's new tragedies and glories.

Frogs

She, his mother, wished he wouldn't be so sweet. It was what she had longed for since he was a little boy, an indifferent, cold little child, and dreamed of. It made it difficult for her not to break down. And how dreary that would be for him, who was so glad to come home.

Always he had been very bored at home. He never since he was at all grown-up—he was twenty-one—had stayed an hour more than was necessary in the old dark sad castle. Now he had six days, just six days, for his own, to do with whatever he chose, away from those places of death, and it seemed that there was nothing he wanted but the old dull things that always before had so bored him.

She had been coming up from the village in the soft wet April afternoon, by the wide central avenue of the parterres between the little clipped yew trees, when he came out to the terrace. She had an instant's sick terror of thinking he was killed, and that this was her vision of him. But he was calling to her, and laughing. She had stopped, and stood quite still, and he had come eagerly, running down the steps to her.

They had six days together.

Often she had thought of the old strong castle that it was a place meant for great things to happen in, glories and disasters. Small things were of no matter in it. There had been no room bright and light enough for a little child to be gay in. Her baby's room had had stone walls and a high carved ceiling and windows four feet deep. If ever he had laughed and shouted, his little voice had been lost among old echoes. How could any child not have been afraid of the shadows that trailed and lurked along the corridors and upon the stairs.

She specially remembered her little son standing with Miss on the top of the terrace steps, under the great Watch Tower, never running to meet her as she came up through the garden, the shadow of the stern old house prisoning him, like some dark spell, in his little white sailor dress.

Now, he had come to meet her eagerly, as she had so used to wish he would.

In the six days he was all the things to her that she had ever dreamed of. He was her little boy who needed her. He had wild gay moments, when his gaiety swept her along, and moments that needed her comforting.

Then it was their last day together, a softly raining day.

In the morning they went for a long tramp through their own woods and on into the forest, deeper and deeper. All the forest ways were full of wet blue hyacinths and songs of thrushes. The little rain made music in the April branches, and the wet smells were as incense in the forest aisles. When they came home he was hungry. Nothing would do but that they should go down to the village to the Place de l'Eglise and get spice bread and barley sugar from old Madame Champenot, as he had used to do when he was a small boy to whom his mother gave five sous for being good.

They must go down the terrace steps and along the avenue to the Queen's Bosquet, where the old statues stood together dressed in ivy, and through the little stern gate in the rampart walls, and across the moat by the new bridge, that was so old, to the Place of the church.

Thatched roofs and tiled roofs were touched with spring wherever moss and lichen clung to them, green and grey and yellow.

He had gone into the little shop, and she had waited outside, not able to talk to any one.

The great Watch Tower of the castle, and the low square grey tower of the church, and all the crooked old tall black chimney-pots seemed to swim in the blue of the sky.

Waiting there she felt that the coming of spring was sad almost past bearing. She thought, soon the frogs in the castle moats would be singing their lonesome song.

Afterwards they went round to the stables, from which all the horses were gone, and he was sad to think how long he had forgotten his little old pony, scarcely bigger than a dog.

In the afternoon he must go everywhere about the house, to all the old rooms and corridors and stairways, that he never before had known he loved. She must go with him, through the great dim attics, and up the tower stairs, and out on to the battlements, to the sunset; down into the great stone-vaulted kitchens, and the cellars that had been dungeons. They went laughingly at first. But afterwards they did not laugh any more. It had come to have the sacredness of a pilgrimage, their small journeying.

He talked quite gaily while they were at dinner in the long dining-hall under the minstrel's gallery.