Old Glory and Verdun, and other stories

It was my first morning at the hospital. The clock in the vestiaire stood at five minutes to eight. At eight I was to begin work. “Report for duty” was the way the formal summons ran. I was to report to Ward Eighty-three, the biggest, the heaviest and the most interesting ward in the hospital. Mrs. Monroe, who had charge of the untrained and unpaid volunteer nurses—or auxiliaires, as they are termed—had told me to await her in the vestiaire. Accordingly I waited, feeling awkward and strange and timid, like a Freshman on his first day at college.

To say that I was nervous would be considerably understating the case. Ever since entering the stone portal of the big American war hospital that morning, I had been smitten with a deadly ague of fear—fear lest in my abysmal ignorance I should do the wrong thing at the wrong time, or fail to do the right thing at the right time, and a man should die as the consequence—a man; a real, live, breathing man—one of those gay, muscular, bright-eyed little boy soldiers of France, with cigarettes perched rakishly behind their ears, that I had seen crowding the streets of Paris on their brief permissions from the Front!

Suddenly it came to me that fastening a handkerchief round the eyes of a blinking but obliging friend was a vastly different affair from fastening a firm, nonslippable bandage across the sockets of a man whose eyes have been torn out by a ball. And how did one stop a hemorrhage? You tied something somewhere. That was the extent of my knowledge on that point. In the confusion of my mind, I had even forgotten how to rescue a drowning man, a formula which has always fascinated me and which I have memorized at intervals ever since the age of ten, thinking that some day in such a fashion I might rescue my future husband. In short, all the carefully acquired artificial knowledge I had been able to absorb in a three-months’ First Aid Course in New York, all the data, the neat lists of questions and answers, had faded clean out of me, like a cheap dye, now that I was faced up with the immediate and grim reality.

That course, and the light-heartedness with which I had pursued it, seemed all at once to me very remote, irrelevant to the present situation, and somehow like a joke in bad taste. I perceived, or I believed I perceived, that I was in a false situation. I had no business in that vestiaire, in that white uniform and coif. If at that moment there had been a train waiting outside the vestiaire door bound for the Grand Central Station, I should have taken it without a second’s hesitation. There being none, I consoled myself with the reflection that, after all, I had not asked to come; that, on the contrary, I had been sent for and urged to begin without delay, as the hospital was undermanned at this summer-vacation season, and the wounded were pouring in, a great steady stream, from the base hospitals.

Moreover, I should not be alone, like a sentinel on his post. Over me, the auxiliaire, was the trained nurse; over the trained nurse was the head nurse; over the head nurse was the doctor of the ward; over the doctor was the assistant surgeon; over the assistant surgeon was the chief surgeon, or médicin chef; and over all of us, interlocking us together, was the French military system and the invisible but potent Papa Joffre. So that if I, alone, could not stop a hemorrhage, I could call my trained nurse; if she could not stop it, she could call the head nurse; if the two of them could not stop it, they could call the ward doctor; and if he could not stop it—but at this point I felt myself on safe ground. The affair was out of my hands!

“Have you ever had to stop a hemorrhage?” I voiced my secret fear to a young Englishwoman beside me, who was rapidly changing from her civilian costume into the crisp white linen infirmière’s blouse of the wards.

“Mon Dieu, no!” She laughed as she pinned on her coif. “Not a chance, with so many nurses round. You’ll have plenty of chance, though, to wash their feet—those that still have feet,” she added soberly. “Is this your first day?”

I nodded.

“And did you have any training—I mean any real training—before you entered?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I took an examination in London; but the examiner was so weary by the time he got to me that he merely said, ‘Have you had the usual course?’ And when I replied ‘Yes,’ he simply passed me through. But it doesn’t matter. You soon pick things up. What’s your ward?”

“Eighty-three.”

She raised her brows at that and glanced at my feet.

“I hope you have comfortable shoes! That ward is the hardest in the hospital—nothing but big primary cases; every single blessé in bed. You’ll have no chance to go to sleep at the switch,” she added with a smile. “If your feet hurt to-night, rub them with cold cream, then alcohol; and lie with them up on the footboard of your bed. It takes the swelling out. Have you read the rules?” She waved her hand toward a printed sheet tacked upon the wall, nodded and hurried off.

I faced round, feeling more than ever like a Freshman on his first day, and read the following:

“AMERICAN AMBULANCE

“CONDITIONS FOR AUXILIARY SERVICE

At this juncture the vestiaire door opened again. I wheeled—I had been wheeling every time it opened for the last ten minutes!—and Mrs. Monroe’s brisk voice said:

“‘Ah, there you are! Sorry to have kept you waiting. I’ll just take you to Miss Brooks, the head nurse of Salle Eighty-three, and she’ll tell you where to begin.’”

Five minutes later introductions had been effected. Miss Brooks, who, together with the doctor, two other nurses and an orderly, was bending over a bed from which proceeded loud screams of “Oh, là là! Oh, là là!! Oh, là là!!! Bon Dieu! Doucement! Oh, là là!” turned to the nurse beside her and said briefly:

“Here’s your auxiliary, Miss Ransome. Is there anything she can start on?”

Miss Ransome did not even glance up. She was holding, firmly grasped in both hands, a man’s leg, stiffly extended, while the doctor lifted pieces of gauze from what appeared to be a deep bloody and suppurating crater in the thigh.

“One moment, please,” she murmured.

The dressing of the wound continued. The man renewed his high agonized cries: “Oh, là là! Oh, Nom d’un Nom! Doucement!—Gently there!”

I stood aside and drew a deep breath. The quality of anguish in those tones had already turned me pale. Later I was to learn to discriminate between sounds of pain. There is the loud outcry of the man who is not in extreme pain, but whose nerves have been so battered by shock, exposure and continued strain that he is no longer master of himself. Second, there is the scream of the man, also suffering from shock and abnormally sensitive, who howls at the mere approach of the doctor.

And finally, there is the cry of the plucky soul, strong to endure, but whose agony has passed the limit of human endurance. Such a cry, bursting out across the ward, simply stampedes the nerves; heard suddenly in the middle of the night it would fetch one out of bed in a single leap, panic-stricken with horror; and even in a big hospital, where innumerable sounds of pain blunt the ear, it still takes the right of way, momentarily stilling the air. As the days went on I was to learn these fine discriminations; but at present all screams were alike to me. I gave each one full value, one hundred per cent of anguish.

While the dressing proceeded I looked about me. Salle Eighty-three was a spacious airy room, lofty-ceiled, with tessellated stone floors, and long French windows on two sides. One set of windows gave upon the rear of the building, and the other side opened on a charming French garden round which the huge structure is built, one room deep, in the shape of a hollow square. Inside the salle the beds were ranged round the four sides and came halfway down the center, forming thus two passages that were none too wide for the busy morning traffic.

Everyone, I perceived, was already working under a full head of steam. Two doctors were in the ward, one on each side, and the dressings were progressing steadily from bed to bed. A nurse preceded the doctors, cutting down the bandages. The air was thick with cries and groans, the cry of “Doucement! Easy there!” prevailing high above all others like a monotonous refrain. French military orderlies were hurrying about, their arms piled high with stained linen; two blowzy-cheeked little femmes de chambre were down on their knees scrubbing the stone floor, their tongues and their sabots clattering together. Ahead of them a bent old woman, with a great red hooked nose and a wide toothless smile, hideous as one of Shakespere’s witches, was passing from bed to bed, gathering up the cigarette butts, chaffing the men and exchanging with them jests as broad as they were good-natured.

It was evident she was a prime favorite, for it was “Grand’mère!” “Grand’mère!” straight down the line, and chuckles followed in the wake of her sallies like bubbles on a stream. Here and there patients able to sit up in bed had removed their chemises and were soaping their chests with gusto. These Grand’mère favored with take-offs on their manly beauty. Bursts of laughter punctuated her hits.

“Here are your men,” said Miss Ransome, joining me—“these twelve. You’re not responsible for the others. Suppose you begin with Claudius there. Wash him. Rub his back with alcohol. Then make his bed. Watch out for his broken leg!” she cautioned.

And she nodded toward that unfortunate member, which, swathed as stiff as that of a mummy and dotted with numerous little rubber tubes that sprouted up through the bandages like unnatural flowers, was swung out upon an extension and held taut by a jungle of pulleys and bags and weights.

“He’s had a hard time,” she continued in a lowered voice. “What with losing his eye and getting his leg infected—you see, he lay wounded four days and four nights on the battlefield, without water, before he was finally rescued—he’s had a tough pull. For weeks we thought he would die. But he fooled us all—didn’t you, Claudius?”

As she spoke English, the boy did not understand. He lay regarding her with a bright dark eye, all the brighter for the black patch which covered its companion; and finally he asked in tones of weary politeness:

“You said, mees?”

“Change all his linen,” she pursued unheeding. “He can raise himself an inch or two. When he’s finished, go straight down the line and do the same to the others. I can’t help you much this morning.”

And she hurried away, leaving me with my first task—to wash the back and change the entire bed linen of a man who could not stir more than an inch or two without exquisite pain!

“Bonjour,” I said by way of commencement. “Comment ça va?—How goes it?”

“Bad. Very bad. That imbecile pig of a leg! Not a moment’s rest did it give me last night. Cramp, cramp, cramp!” He clenched and unclenched his fist with nervous irritability to indicate the nature of the pain, while the flare of crimson in his thin cheeks testified to a heightened temperature. “I wish you’d cut it off to-night,” he growled, “and stand it over in the corner.”

“I will—with my scissors,” I promised. “And to-morrow, if it’s been good, we’ll fasten it back on with safety pins.”

“You needn’t bother,” he grinned.

With many gaspings and painful grimaces he got hold of an overhead hand grip, dug his head deep into the pillow and managed to raise himself until his back described a parabola perhaps two inches above the bed. “Quick! Quick!” he commanded breathlessly. I washed him as best I could. Afterward I glanced up at the chart hanging behind his bed and read there: “Simondon, Claudius. Age, 21. Wounded May 25, 1916. Admitted June 7, 1916.” Claudius, aged twenty-one, had already white hairs in his head, and his slight figure was shrunken and yellow and dry, like that of a little old man. At the same time there was about him something unquenchably boyish and debonair, which made one wish to weep.

“Have you ever been in a charge?” I asked, to divert his attention.

“Yes; ten of them. Not interesting! Not interesting at all! You stand there in a trench, water up to your knees, holding your gun and waiting for the order. You are cold, and still you perspire. You tremble with agitation. Maybe you stand thus for hours. Or you climb over the parapet and run. If the Boches retreat, yes, then it is interesting. If they come on, no, not interesting. Not interesting at all!” And he looked up at me with his sardonic grin. “War,” he added, “is the stupidest game that a fellow with wits can play at.”

A minute later he confided to me that he was to receive a decoration. He was to receive the Croix de Guerre.

“But that is fine!” I exclaimed.

“Ah, you think so?” jeered Claudius. “It’s very fine, without doubt; but as for me, I’d rather have my eye than that pretty little medal hung on my chest. Can I see the world with that little medal? Zut! I prefer my eye—thanks.”

For the moment his nonchalance completely deceived me. It was not until several days later when I came upon him unobserved, poring over the official notice of his decoration, and caught the look of pride, of emotion in the young face, that I really got the matter straight. Twenty-one is twenty-one the world over, and always hides its loves.

After washing Claudius and rubbing his back with alcohol, I made his bed. In France the bed is a sacred institution and the making of one is not a proper subject for jest. But I am not jesting when I say that the ordinary, casually made American bed, with its opportunities for ventilation and its light loose covers which one may kick joyously down to the foot in the morning, would fill the average Frenchwoman with amazement and scorn.

A French bed is something in the nature of a cocoon, with a hole in the upper right-hand corner, into which one artfully insinuates oneself at night, and from which one artfully disengages oneself in the morning. All apertures, save the small one at the top, are hermetically sealed—so tightly are the sheets drawn under the mattress, so smoothly are the covers laid on, so exquisitely are the corners mitered. One is all but sewed into bed.

To make such a bed is to produce a work of art, a creation. Thus, Jean and Marie made my bed every morning at the hotel, folding on each layer as close as the successive skins of an onion, while I watched them with respectful admiration. Once, feeling too warm in the middle of the night, I tried to remove a blanket. I struggled until four o’clock the next morning. Next time I am going to send for professional wreckers.

But the making of such a bed is, after all, a comparatively simple affair—for I am not in it! Let us denominate it Class C in order of difficulty. Class B is the making of such a bed with an occupant, but an occupant who can help himself—stir about. Class A is the making of such a bed with an immovable man in it; a man, moreover, attached to a network of apparatus—cords, pulleys, overhead weights and drains, all in such delicate adjustment that to jar any of them will wrench a cry of torture from the occupant.

To this last class belonged the bed of Claudius. When, after three-quarters of an hour’s labor, punctuated by many exclamations of “Doucement! Doucement!” I straightened myself, Claudius was rather white and I was perspiring freely. Still, that bed was made—it really should be written Made!—and I surveyed it proudly. The lower sheet in particular had been difficult to dispose properly. To me it appeared at least twice too long for the mattress, and in the end I had simply wadded up the extra yards of length and tucked them under the pillows.

It was during this latter operation when Justin, the orderly, came upon me. Justin is a squat, grotesque little old man, with the head of a gargoyle set on powerful Atlas-like shoulders. Being an orderly is his métier. He has been one in a French military hospital for twenty years, which is to say that Justin is a very wise man. I believe he could give points to Solomon, for Solomon was not a Frenchman. He regarded my bungling efforts for a moment in silence, and then said in tones of grave reproach:

“Ah, mademoiselle, it is not thus we make a bed in France! Permit me.”

Saying which, he stripped the bed bare to the mattress and made it afresh, with the subtle perfection of Jean and Marie. My crumpled undersheet was drawn taut as a drumhead. Followed in swift succession the drawsheet, the top sheet and the blankets, smooth as rose petals and as firmly fixed.

Where, meantime, was Claudius, with his weak back, his smashed leg and his jungle of apparatus? Not a single cry had escaped him. A glance showed his thin dark face alight with amusement as he watched old Justin teach the strange “mees” how to make a bed with a live Frenchman in it.

“V’là!” said Justin, straightening himself. “That’s the way we make a bed in France!” And he padded noiselessly off in his battered blue list slippers; it had taken him exactly six minutes by the ward clock.

The next bed, when I turned down the covers, revealed a patient whose linen was saturated and stiff with blood. Another undersheet to manipulate!

“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” came a faint moan from the pillows.

“Where are you wounded?” I inquired, for this is the first fact a maker of beds must determine.

“Both legs broken below the knees,” was the feeble reply.

“Don’t stop to do him now,” said Miss Ransome, approaching the bed. “He’s just been brought in and is going up for operation. You can make his bed while he is away. Look at those feet!” she exclaimed, pointing.

I looked. Beneath the caked and dried blood from his wounds the mud of the Somme was ground into his skin until it was blackened as if from powder.

“Some of them are worse than that!” said she. “Last week there came in to us a little poilu, straight from the first-line trenches of Verdun. How long he had been without a wash even he himself did not know. The doctor gave one long-range sniff and said hastily: ‘Send him to the baths!’ It seemed, however, that he was not acquainted with baths—at least not in the ‘all-together’ and in an American bathtub; for the attendants said that he fought like a wild cat—and when he came back he was crying! He had faced the cannon at Verdun; he had been smashed to pieces by a shell, and had his leg cut off up to his thigh with only a local anæsthetic without flinching; but he wept with fear at sight of an American bath and demanded to be sent back to the trenches!”

The bedmaking went on, somewhat raggedly to be sure, for on those first days I was obsessed by an absurd and fantastic fear that sometime when I pulled away the drawsheet I should pull away also a mangled leg upon it. There was one bed, however, which I grew to enjoy making, and that was the bed of Grandpère—fat, dirty, profane, cross-grained, whimsical old Grandpère. He was notorious in the ward as a grouch. Claudius declared that he had been jilted in love and had had the “black butterflies” ever since. He was what is known as an endless-chain smoker. He lighted one cigarette from the end of another and kept going the entire day through, with the result that his chemise front was always full of little burnt holes and powdered thick with ashes.

Nor was his bed much better. One swept out of it each morning aluminum filings, chunks of bread, apple parings, handkerchiefs, books, nutshells, letters, as well as innumerable little pillows and pads with which Grandpère combated the hated “currents of air” from the open windows. The fact was, he got no peace day or night from a badly infected leg, and sometimes he was hard driven for diversion.

Between him and a certain substitute nurse in the ward there existed a violent and mutual antipathy. She was an excellent nurse professionally, but hard, brusque in manner, and without a single word of French to build a bridge of sympathy between herself and her patients, among whom she was known as the old mitrailleuse. Between her and Grandpère was waged a fierce battle each morning over the making of his bed. She lectured him roundly in English for his untidiness, and Grandpère retorted volubly in French, with a vocabulary that would have enchanted a cow-puncher. She was displeased with the state of his chemises, and Grandpère was highly displeased with her displeasure.

“What is she saying, the old mitrailleuse?” he would whisper to me, his little gray eyes gleaming with mischievous humor. “Why has she always the great anger?”

“She says you smoke too much—that your bed is full of trash.”

“But, mon Dieu, that is my sole distraction! And what else?”

“She says you burn holes in your chemise and that it is always covered with ashes.”

“But—my word!—does she know nothing, then, of the laws of Nature—the old Anglaise!—that ashes always tumble downward, not upward; and that fire always burns? Can I make the ashes go upward into the air? I am not God. I am only a Frenchman.”

An hour later he would beckon me secretly over to his side, point to a fresh perforation of his chemise, a fresh sprinkling of ashes, and whisper gleefully:

“Tell the old mitrailleuse to come and sweep me out again!”

He enjoyed the encounters! And as they were, indeed, his sole distraction through weary days, I sometimes humored him.

The dressings, meantime, continued, with their unceasing accompaniment of groans and cries of “Doucement!” A young surgeon told me that doucement was the first French word he acquired; and undeniably it is the word oftenest heard during the dressings period. This does not signify that the patients are, as a rule, given to outcry. On the contrary, these young Frenchmen endure the intensest pain with a kind of smiling white fortitude that brings a furtive tear to the eye.

Let me take, for example, the demeanors of the three whose beds are on a little sleeping porch on the terrace—Claudius, François, Emile. Their being on the terrace carries its own significant hint of special weakness. Of these three, Claudius, when under extreme stress, shuts tightly his one eye, thrusts his knuckles into his mouth and bites them until they bleed. If the pain has shaken him unendurably, when the doctor and the nurses depart he puts a pillow over his face and weeps into it silently.

François, on the other hand, an idyllically handsome aristocratic youth of twenty-one, with a smashed arm and leg, takes an opposite course. He looks his pain squarely in the face as if it were an adversary, with an assumption of nonchalant scorn. Under a particularly painful dressing or probe his eyes grow steely and narrow, while his lips under the little golden brown mustache begin to smile sternly. As the pain increases, that smile becomes more distinct, more contemptuous and challenging. I have a notion that secretly François loves pain for the opportunity it affords him to test the fine unblunted steel of his young courage.

Emile, a Breton lad of twenty-two, with a ball through his lungs, has a different reaction. He hoists himself painfully up in bed, stares out upon the garden with his mystical blue eyes, coughs, winces; and at the end he lays himself down again, gasping, and says gently, “Sank you, mees!” That is all, a soft “Sank you, mees!” spoken in English to please me! Of those three reactions Emile’s is the hardest to bear.

In lively contrast to these is the conduct of Grandpère. Grandpère no longer has any romantic illusions to sustain, no youthful reticences. The first article in his creed is that if you suffer pain you should yell. If it makes you feel better, begin to yell beforehand. And curse! Use all the powers of protest the good God has given you. Accordingly from the first to the last moment of a dressing he lets himself out, so to speak, and the entire ward chuckles over his choice list of epithets.

But, despite the amount of concentrated pain that it holds, the big airy ward is much more a place of laughter than of depression and gloom. When the dressings are finished, and the aftermath of painful throbbing has died down, the natural life and vivacity of fifty Frenchmen reassert themselves. They banter and chaff each other and discuss every discussible or undiscussible subject under the sun. Naturally the present struggle comes in for the lion’s share of debate; nor is the feeling concerning it by any means unanimous. In that small bedfast community are ardent imperialists, conservatives, radicals, syndicalists and philosophic anarchists; and each one of them takes a hack at the great conflict from his own angle of vision. Nor have they within them the hate for the German that seems to animate some of the spectators on the side lines. At any rate he is not a monster; in fact, one was forced to believe from their many stories of good will that the average German was really almost human!

“What do you think of the Germans?” a young soldier asked me suddenly one day as I was taking his temperature.

“Their methods, you mean? I thought there were no two opinions on that.”

“Very well!” he retorted. “Then you take the French side and I’ll take the German side, and we’ll discuss the subject. Begin, if you please.”

“No; you begin!” I said, rather curious to hear what a wounded Frenchman would have to say in defense of his foe.

He talked for ten minutes, brilliantly, earnestly, caustically, holding the thermometer like a cigarette in one corner of his mouth; and at the end of that time he had proved not indeed that the Germans were right, but that war itself was so intrinsically degrading and hellish—despite what romanticists might say to the contrary of its elevating spiritual effect on the soul—that it exerted a debasing influence on whoever engaged in it, be he German, French, English, Russian or American.

“War is a rotten business for the individual,” he wound up soberly. “And don’t let them sidetrack you by saying it’s the Germans. They’re not monsters. It’s war itself that’s the monster. It’s a bad microbe. A mean little soul it poisons, and a big soul it poisons also. The physical wounds—like this,” he touched his bandaged shoulder—“you can see. The wounds on the soul are invisible. But, believe me, they exist just the same, and are even more ghastly. I know!” And he handed back the thermometer with a smile.

The real word-battles, however, take place between themselves. Sometimes an argument lasts for weeks, and they have a go at it every fine afternoon, wrestling with each other like the conversational experts they are. Sometimes it is only a brief but hot dispute. It was one of the latter that took place about a month after my arrival, between François and Claudius. That particular afternoon a concert was impending. It was to be given in the garden by a crack Belgian military band, and programs had just been handed round.

Claudius looked over his card and I saw his expressive face darken.

“The Marseillaise isn’t down!” he exclaimed. “If they haven’t the courtesy to play the French national air to wounded French soldiers in a French military hospital, I, for one, shall not listen to their old concert. I shall sleep!”

Saying which, he scornfully tossed the program over into the garden and composed himself for slumber. But François, who was feeling gay that day, could not permit such a remark to pass.

“I don’t think so highly of that Marseillaise!” he remarked languidly, but with the light of battle in his eyes. “It’s not a good song. On the contrary, it’s a very bad song.”

Claudius’ one eye popped wide open. He fairly leaped into the combat.

“What!” he exclaimed, flushing with anger. “You say the Marseillaise is not a good song? You say this is not good?” And, propping himself up on one elbow, his eye still blazing, he chanted the immortal battle cry:

“Voilà!” cried Claudius, his voice shaky with emotion. “You dare to say that is not a good song?”

“Ah, the music’s all right,” admitted François loftily. “It’s the words.”

“And what’s the matter with the words? Why aren’t they good?”

“Why?” said François coolly. “Because they incite to carnage! ‘Formez vos bataillons!’ But what for? To kill somebody! No, no; such words are not good.”

The irrefutable logic of this, Claudius chose to ignore.

“You are not a true Frenchman,” he declared scornfully.

François began to smile—the cold distinct smile of the dressing hour. He glanced round for a weapon. A cup of wine stood on his bedside table. His fingers closed round it.

“Say that again!” he remarked pleasantly.

Claudius’ hand had likewise gripped his wineglass. Of the two he was much more passionate. He glared hardily and began:

“You’re not a——”

The head nurse appeared opportunely on the threshold.

“François,” she said severely, “you know you mustn’t drink that wine when you’re going up for operation!”

François looked at the nurse, at me, at the wine in his cup, and from thence to Claudius, who by now was grinning broadly.

“I wasn’t going to drink it,” he observed mildly. “I was going to give it to the camarade, there!”

And he proffered it gravely to Claudius, who drank it down with equal politeness; then suddenly both of them tumbled back on their pillows and went off into boyish little yips of laughter under the startled eyes of the nurse. And, to finish off the episode, the Belgian band really played the Marseillaise after all.

The first few weeks I was in the ward we were enlivened each morning by the performance of Clarice. Clarice was a hen; and every day, at precisely ten o’clock, she laid an egg. It happened in this way: There was a young one-armed soldier, an opera singer before the war, who, for the amusement of his companions, would lie upon his bed and with his voice conjure all the animals of the farmyard into lively existence. The deep growl of the watchdog, the grunting of a pig, the whickering of horses down in the meadow, the lordly crow of the cock, the busy cackling of the hen—he reproduced them all with startling realism. The hen, in particular, he loved to delineate.

The sound would start suddenly under one of the hospital beds—the low Tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck! of a hen talking softly to herself as she scratched in the hay.

“Sh! It’s Clarice! She’s going to lay an egg!” somebody would cry; and all the ward held its breath during the operation.

After a period of soft clucking—Tuck-tuck, tuck-tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck!—which Clarice required to dispose herself suitably and discreetly upon her nest, a profound silence ensued. Clarice was laying her egg! The men lay perfectly still, smiling expectantly, glancing now and again at the clock. The hush was absolute. It was Clarice’s moment.

Presently a loud, triumphant cackle issued forth: Tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck, tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck! The egg was an accomplished fact. And Clarice, her proud duty done, flew straight to her lord and master, who added his crow of patronizing approbation. The illusion of the performance was perfect, and little Clarice was a source of great delight to the men, who built round her all sorts of romances.

“That’s our little Clarice!” Emile explained to me the first time I heard her. “But she is admirable, that Clarice! She lays an egg each morning; and we give it to a sick camarade for his déjeuner!”

By the time the beds are made, clean bandages adjusted, vacant beds disinfected, the individual tables scrubbed and hot drinks fetched from the diet kitchen, the day is well under way. The dressings, meantime, proceed steadily down the ward. Sometimes, after a new offensive, when the big war hospital has received a fresh influx of the wounded, every bed contains a battered wreck, these dressings fill the entire morning and continue straight through the afternoon.

Those are trying days for heart and head and feet. Through all the hours the busy stream of traffic flows constantly through this, the heaviest ward. There are men going up to operations on stretchers; men coming down from operations, unconscious, on stretchers; men being discharged, with their meager little sack of possessions, also on stretchers. Good-bys are shouted—“Bon voyage!” “All aboard!” “En voiture!” Or the orderly enters with a batch of letters—letters from home.

“Simondon!” he bawls cheerily.

“Present!”

“Girod!”

“Present!”

“Coussin!”

“Discharged!” a voice volunteers.

“Morel!... Morel!... Morel?”

“Give me that letter,” says the head nurse quietly, for Morel cannot receive it; Morel is dead.

At about half past ten, when the ward is in fair order, and the blessés under their fresh linen look like rows of good children in bed, the médicin chef, or chief surgeon, makes his rounds. As he approaches a bed its occupant salutes, and then listens with intense concentration to the strange English jargon of the ward doctor, who is making his daily report. Perhaps he catches the word “operation”—which every soldier knows. After the surgeon has passed he beckons and whispers eagerly:

“What did he say? What did the médicin chef say? Operation?”

I nod. “Only a little one. But no lunch to-day. No good pinard!”

Pinard is the trench slang for wine, corresponding to the English “booze.” That word, upon my lips, will nearly always bring a laugh from a poilu. But no laugh greets me this time. He sinks back upon his pillow, a little white and very quiet. The day has suddenly lost its color for him.

After the great médicin chef—or God, as he is irreverently termed in the ward—has departed, with his halo of dread, déjeuner is the next important feature of the day. Serving a community of fifty a three-course meal—soup, meat and vegetables, and dessert—is a man-size proposition. Serving it on bed tables, often cutting up the food and feeding the armless patients, further complicates the task. The first day I completely lost my head. My clamorous young brood, nine of whom were under twenty-two, reminded me of nothing so much as a nestful of yawping baby robins waiting to be fed.

It was: “Look out for my leg, mees!” “More bread, mees!” “My serviette, mees!” “Have you forgotten me, mees?” “My God, my soup’s tipped into my bed! I’m afloat, mees!” And all in a rapid bubble of French that made my head spin. At last, in sheer desperation, I addressed them in the American language: “You darned kids—shut up!” As was usual in those first days, it was old Justin who came to my aid and disentangled me.

The patients’ déjeuner over, the auxiliaires have three-quarters of an hour off for their own, which they may get at the hospital or at some of the neighboring pâtisseries. As for me, that first day I choked down a few mouthfuls and then retired to the vestiaire to rest my feet.

The afternoon was cut off the same piece of cloth as the morning—more beds, more dressings, more bandages, more high shrill cries, more gayety and laughter. But about four o’clock in the afternoon something began to happen. It began to happen in bed Number Ten. Its occupant, a handsome dark lad of eighteen, had a gangrenous arm, the sight of which, with its deep gashes to let out the poison, turned one faint with horror. All the morning, at intervals, I had held a basin while he retched, or fetched hot-water bottles.

About four o’clock he began to babble of his mother, his brothers and sisters, and his home in the country. He laughed, chatted, cried out “Maman!” repeatedly, and tried to rise to go to her. Presently it was found necessary to strap his supple, strong young body to the mattress. At the time I had not the faintest notion that he was already in the antechamber of death, so alive he was, so palpitant with restless energy.

Suddenly he lay still. I had turned to get another hot-water bottle. “Never mind!” said the nurse, and at some quality in her voice I paused, startled, and looked again. He was gone. His passing had been as light and unpretentious as a breath of air through the open window.

After he was carried out I disinfected his bed and made it afresh, in a strange convulsion of soul. Thus I had my first glimpse of that vast, interminable procession which must haunt the dreams of ambitious kings.

As yet, I have been to no battlefronts. I have letters, to be sure, which if presented in the proper quarters, I am told, would result in personally conducted trips to lines not engaged in an actual offensive. But those letters still lie, unsent, in my trunk. I may use them some day. But at present there is within me a reluctance to visiting ruins and battlefields. Perhaps it is because I have seen so many ruins who have returned from those battlefields.

Moreover, I have already been to the Front and I have made a charge. It was a hand-grenade charge, under the leadership of one Sergeant Girod, who since then has been awarded the Croix de Guerre. The announcement of the award reads, “For conspicuous bravery in leading a brilliant hand-grenade attack against the enemy while under fire from our own mitrailleuses.” I know it was a brilliant attack, for I made it with him. It happened in this way:

It was six o’clock in the evening, and the big salle, with its forest of overhead apparatus, was wrapped in warm darkness, through which the bright, glowing ends of cigarettes bloomed like tiny stars. The electricity was out of order and the sole lights—two tall candles on the head nurse’s desk in the middle of the room, with their straight still flames—lent an air of enchantment to the place. The men, their suppers over, lay smoking tranquilly, or chatted in undertones. To me it was the pleasantest hour of the day. I had lingered to make up another bed, the occupant for which, a fresh arrival, had not yet come down from the operating room.

“Can you stay a few minutes?” called the head nurse as she hurried past me. “I am called away; the nurses are down at first supper, and someone should be here when your man arrives.”

I promised to remain. A few minutes later the big double doors were flung open and a dark jumbled mass appeared. The same instant a loud shout shattered the quiet gloom:

“En avant, mes enfants! Vive la France! En avant! Toujours en avant! Ils approchent! Les Boches! Les infidels! Les brigands! Ils approchent à gauche! Regardez à gauche! A gauche!—They’re approaching on the left! Look out on the left—En avant, mes enfants! Toujours en avant!”

It was a shout that would send a thrill along a dead man’s spine. A ripple of laughter went round the room. Raised heads peered eagerly. The brancardiers came forward, two wheeling the stretcher and two more holding down the occupant, who was struggling convulsively to raise himself and shouting hoarse commands in a voice that could be heard a block away.

“Where does he go, mees?” came Justin’s steady tones.

“Here—Bed Eight.”

“En avant! En avant, mes enfants! Regardez à gauche! A gauche! Ils approchent à gauche! Les Boches, ils approchent!” The hoarse shouts did not cease for an instant.

“He’s leading a charge,” said Justin, grimly pleased, as they paused beside me. “Hand grenades! He’s a terrible fellow. He killed ten Boches coming down the stairs!”

Then, all together, with a “Un, deux, trois—Allez!” the four lifted him from the stretcher into bed.

He was a powerfully built man, fair, with blue eyes and a blond mustache, and his chemise, torn away in the struggle, revealed a torso that gleamed like ivory. Suddenly he looked up and gripped me with a hand of iron.

“Criez avec moi: ‘Vive la France!’”

“Vive la France!” I repeated in a low voice, to soothe him.

“Louder! Shout louder: ‘Vive la France!’”

“Vive la France!” I said more loudly. “Lie still now. It’s over. The attack is finished.”

“And the Boches?” he queried eagerly. “They are gone?”

“All gone.”

“No, no!” he cried violently, trying to rise. “They’re not gone! They’re still coming on! My God, see them! Wave on wave! Regardez à gauche, mes enfants! Les Boches! Les brigands! Ah, my poor comrades!” he murmured. “See them fall!” He turned to me, whom evidently he took for one of his grenadiers: “Citronne went down just then. Did you see him? Was he killed?”

“No; only wounded. Be quiet now. It’s done.”

“But not well done,” he retorted impatiently. “We hadn’t enough balls. To-night we attack again. Listen well!”

And then he gave me my orders. It appeared that on each side of us were Moroccan troops who were to follow our attack with a charge. For a few minutes Girod was silent. Suddenly he broke out:

“Boom! Soixante-quinze!”—the French seventy-fives. “Boom! Les canons!” He appeared to be listening to the bombardment. Presently he sighed. “Ah, my poor wife! My poor Cécilie! You know, I have a wife and three children—two boys and a girl.”

It was evident to me that the sergeant had a presentiment that he was going to fall in the attack. After a long silence his voice came to me abruptly out of the dark:

“What time is it?”

I named the hour.

“Well, then, my friend, we have still ten minutes. Let us smoke a cigarette before we part.” A second later he was shouting at the top of his powerful voice:

“En avant, mes enfants! Ils approchent! Les Boches! Regardez à gauche! A gauche!”

Over and over he issued his commands to his grenadiers; over and over he shouted his warning cry, calling frantically for bombs that were not forthcoming; and always he was driven back, despairing, by the tide of Germans on his left. His brain, like a talking-machine record, had recorded faithfully every detail of that last wild, brilliant attack, terminating so disastrously because of the shortage of balls; and in his delirium he played that one record ceaselessly, with no thought, action or sensation omitted. But as the hours went by the record played slowly and more slowly, with gaps of silence in between. Finally he slept.

There is another chapter to add to this episode concerning Girod. It happened some three weeks later. And as this is not fiction, but a plain reporting of facts, I hasten to add that Girod did not die.

Passing his bed, however, one afternoon, I laid my hand casually on the iron bed-frame. It was trembling. The entire bed was vibrating steadily, gently, as if to the oscillation of some remote earthquake. Astonished, I looked at Girod. And Girod was trembling too. It was he who caused the tremor of the bed. Beneath the white coverlet his big body shook with a ceaseless, mysterious agitation.

“What is the matter?” I cried. “Why are you trembling like that?”

He gave a faint, apologetic smile.

“I’m afraid!” he said simply. “I’m afraid of that operation this afternoon.”

“But it’s nothing,” I assured him—“really nothing at all. Only a slight incision in the shoulder.”

“I know. But—I’m afraid! You see——” He broke off, knitting his brows. “It was not always thus. Once I did not know what fear was—before—— That’s why they made me leader of the bombing squad. I was reckless. But now—I’m afraid. I’m afraid of that little operation!”

“You’ve been under a strain,” I said.

I recalled Girod’s history. He had narrated it to me one rainy afternoon. From his wife, Cécilie, and his three children, he had not heard a word since the war opened, as they lived in the invaded territory. For the last six weeks before he was wounded he and his comrades had been in the first-line trenches, unrelieved, without food save for their reserve stores; and without water, unless one crawled on one’s belly at night to a spring in the dangerous strip of No Man’s Land between them and the enemy’s trenches.

Each night he crawled to the spring, filled his canteen and crawled back to his wounded companions. And then came one night when the spring failed.

“I crawled out there, as usual,” Girod related, “and found it full of cadavers!”

“And after that?” I persisted.

But Girod made no reply.

“It’s the strain, the heavy strain,” I said again.

A nurse—the one known as the mitrailleuse—at that instant passed his bed.

“What’s the matter with him?” she demanded brusquely. “What’s he shaking for?”

“The operation,” I said. “He fears it. It’s the strain he’s been under so long——”

“Pooh!” she broke out impatiently. “Some of these men can’t stand pain any better than a baby!”

As the days and the weeks go by the ward changes. Men recover or die, or are discharged to convalescent hospitals; and fresh wrecks appear in their places, sleep in their beds, and smile up to one from the pillow. The big salle is an antechamber, with exits leading both ways—out into the great adventure of life and out into the still greater adventure of death. At the end of three months scarcely a single familiar face remains. But the exit leading back into life is always open. The recovered men return.

An aviator, whose leg had been amputated at the hospital, comes to announce that he is to have the honor of returning to the Front. He is the last of his class of eight—and he must fly with a wooden leg.

Even Claudius has been discharged. He has gone home to his mother and sister, of whom he is the sole support. A letter from him lies before me.

“My leg is no good,” he writes, “and I never shall be able to use it to work. What shall I do? I shall have to ride that leg all day in a carriage! But where am I to get the carriage? I shall go to America! Do you think some rich—and pretty—young American mees would marry me and let me ride in her carriage?”

That, indeed, would be a solution for Claudius! And I am making his modest wants known, with the hopes that some pretty—and rich—young American “mees” may wish to take a flyer on a young Frenchman, considerably smashed but with his sense of humor intact. If she should, and can guarantee the carriage, I will send her Claudius’ address.