Chapter IV: Part III: Paris (1)

Monday, October 11th

I was thinking all night in the train--how can I look at them, how can I speak to them in their depth of grief? I was thinking--when the old woman comes to open the door, what can I say to her? When the old man comes to take my big dressing-case and my little dressing-case, and my strap of books, how can I face him? Their son is dead.

The son of our concierge is dead. "Mort au Champ d'Honneur."

They were so proud of him. They did so worship him. He was such a clever boy that he had gone beyond anything they had ever imagined. If you just in passing saw him with them, you thought he did not belong to them at all. You thought he was a gentleman who was waiting a minute for some reason, there in the loge. But you would have known, if you had had time for it, how he worshipped them and was proud of them; they had worked so hard, his little fat slow sweet mother in the neat black dress, and his little stumpy cross father, who made it a point to come to the door in his shirt sleeves.

In those wonderful first days the son of our concierge went away.

It was on Tuesday, the second day, in the afternoon, about five o'clock. He had to be at the Gare d'Austerlitz at seven, and getting there was difficult.

I think that day was the most cruel and most wonderful of all. I shall always remember how hot it was, and how the leaves were fallen in the garden.

They told me how it seemed as if he really could not go. He kept starting, and coming back; and starting, and coming back. He hugged his little fat old mother, in her neat black dress; and hugged her, and had to turn back to hug her again. His father was going with him, to help carry the bundles. He was in his shirt sleeves. He kept blowing and blowing his nose. His mother had said she would not come to the door. But she did come to the door. She had said she would not stand to watch him go. But she did, crying and smiling and waving to him. He got to the street corner four different times. And three of the times he came back, to hug her just once again.

And he is killed.

There will be the little stumpy father in his shirt sleeves, and the little, so very respectable mother, fat and slow.

How can I look at them? What can I say to them?

They must open the door for us, and pay the taxi, and carry up our things.

How can I tell them that I kneel before their sorrow as if it were a throne?

Same day, 11th of October

The first thing to do was to go up to my neighbour's queer big kitchen--up on the roofs--because there were eleven little soldiers at supper, to whom, though I have not been here to see them until now, I must say good-bye. It is the last day of their leave, they will be off to-morrow.

Always my permissionnaires eat with my neighbour's permissionnaires together in the kitchen on the roof. They are always men from the invaded countries, who have nowhere to go for their leave.

Before, they have always been men who had been in hospitals and were sent to us for their sick-leave; but these are little young boys, the Classe Seize, just from their dépôts, with a few days of leave before their beginning of battle. The oldest of them is nineteen.

You go up to the kitchen by a little twisted stairway, like the stairway of a tower. On three sides of the kitchen there are charming blue mansarde roofs and black crooked chimney-pots, and on the fourth side there are the treetops of an old garden. When the leaves are fallen, one can look down from the kitchen terrace, through the branches of the trees, and see all the design of the garden, paths and lawns, statues and massifs and the big central basin, as in the ground plan, drawn so long ago.

To-night the fallen leaves in the sunset made the garden a place all of amber. One looked down into an amber glow. And all the roofs and treetops of the quarter, and the two tall towers of Sainte Clotilde, seemed translucent; for the gold of the sunset to shine through.

The kitchen has a floor of polished red brick tiles and shines with beautiful copper pots.

Eleven little soldiers were just finishing their coffee at the table with the red cloth.

What babies they are. And how alike they look, all of them. It is absurd. Eleven round close-cropped heads; eleven round rosy peasant faces; eleven pairs of round clear eager questioning eyes; eleven straight young figures, with stiff gestures, in bleu d'horizon.

Classe Seize, eighteen years, nineteen years, twenty years. It has become the age to die.

Tuesday, October 12th

The Chocolates

I went to get some chocolates at a little shop near the hospital.

The woman of the shop counted me out the heap of chocolates one by one in their silver paper.

She was a thin pale little woman with the sort of blue eyes that are always sad. Her eyes looked as if they had cried and cried, in her worn faded little face. She had the little woollen cape of the quarter around her shoulders and her pale hair was rather grey.

While she was counting the chocolates the postman came. He brought a big square yellow envelope addressed in that special writing, surely, of a little soldier, and with the franchise militaire.

I thought--It is a letter from her son.

She took it, thanking the postman, and put it down on the table and went on counting out the chocolates.

"But, Madame," I said, "are you not going to read your letter?"

She turned and I saw that she was crying.

"It is from my son," she said.

She began putting the chocolates in handfuls into a paper bag.

She said, "This morning I had a notice from the Mairie that he is killed."

The Goldfish and the Watch

On a table in the window there was an opal-blue bowl full of water, with purple iris floating in it, and little bright goldfish, four of them, glinting through it.

Some one had given it that day to the children.

René, the eldest boy, stood by the table watching the goldfish, not thinking of his father at all.

There were minutes in the days when he did not think of his father.

But afterwards it was always the same thing.

He never told any one, because he was seven years old and very shy. No one would have understood. And it was dreadful to him when people did not understand.

It was about his father's watch.

On one thick, hot, velvet-black night, his father had come into his room and waked him with a sudden switching on of the light, and said, "Hop up, old chap, you've got to go and tell your mother to stop crying."

"But, father, why? Will she not stop when you tell her?"

"It is because of me that she cries. I have got to go away."

"Oh, father, why have you got to go away?"

"Because there is war, René. I have got to go and fight. And you have got to stay and look after your mother. Quick now; go to her and say, 'I'm here.'"

"But, father----"

"Here's my watch for you, old chap, and the chain, you see. Mind you take care of it. Don't let it run down. I want to find it right to the minute when I come back. And I want to find your mother well, not crying--and you, my brave little man, taking care of everything for me."

"Like the watch, father?"

"Yes, like the watch."

So he had to take simply terrible care of his father's watch.

If it ran down, if he let it run down, what in the world would not happen?

The battles might be lost to France. His mother might die. And then whatever could he say to his father?

In the days he used to hurry home from everything, to the watch. And in the nights he used to sit up in bed to listen for its ticking. He would stay awake for hours in the nights, afraid it might stop and he not know. Often in the nights he would cry from the tiredness of having to keep awake and listen. But in the days he would forget the watch, sometimes, for a little.

To-day he was happy because of the goldfish.

Hospital, Friday, October 15th

Just these days the people of several of the men have been coming from far to see them.

Way off, in some little town of Brittany or the Béarn, or Provence, there had arrived word that the soldier this or that had been wounded thus or so, and was at the hospital. Upon months and months of waiting in dreadful, helpless ignorance, the shock had come as a relief almost.

But how strange and terrible a thing the journey was to people who could understand so little what they must do. Where to go, what to do. Perhaps they were people who had never ventured beyond the town where the diligence stopped, who never had taken a train. They did not know what the Champagne meant. They did not know where Paris was. The departure was a tremendous thing. A tearing up of roots and cutting with a knife. Then the journey, confused and terrifying. Then the great city, and the great hospital.

There is a moment when it seems as if it were a stranger, the boy lying there, in the bed that is one of such a long row of beds. His people stand, a little dazed, down by the door. The long ward, the two long rows of beds against its walls, the stretcher-beds down the middle of it; and all those boys who lie so still--how strange it seems to them! And their boy, who does not wave his hand or shout to them, who scarcely lifts his head--his smile has changed, has come to be quite a different smile.

Hospital, Sunday, October 17th

Number 24

Number twenty-four is dying. I am very glad. It is much better for him that he should die. But it takes so long. It is terrible that it should take so long to die.

He calls me, "Ma petite dame."

"My little lady, what time is it?"

Strange, how they ask that, so many of them, when they are dying.

There is a clock on the wall opposite his bed. They tell me that for three weeks he has not been able to see it. He says the room is full of mist.

He says, "My little lady, can you see the clock?"

I always answer, "No, I cannot see the clock."

He says, "You cannot see it because of the mist."

And I say, "I cannot see it, because of the mist."

La Mort d'un Civil

The old Monsieur is dying. He has been dying for days and days and days. He is dying at a time when death is very cheap. Every one is dying. The youth of the whole world is being taken away. What does it matter at all that an old man, who has no part in the war, is taken away? Who, except his elderly maiden daughter, has time to care?

Cousine Gertrude is very kind. She comes every evening, after the hospital, and stays for two hours, sitting in the room, knitting grey socks, while his daughter rests a little.

Her boy François, aged twenty-one, went out on the first day. He has been all the time in the trenches, except for one leave of six days. He is in the trenches now, in Champagne.

The man dying here has everything that is possible done for him. He has the best that can be had of doctors and nurses.

These boys in the trenches one dares not think of how it may be with them.

His daughter is very brave. She never cries. She remembers that Cousine Gertrude would like a cup of tea.

She knows that the son of Cousine Gertrude is young and beautiful.

Death, in these days, is young and beautiful.

And her father is old. His death is only a dreary thing.

She understands that even people as good as Cousine Gertrude must grudge it its place in the world.

Canal

In all the mornings and nights, going to the hospital and coming back from it, I love my canals. The canals of Venice, of Holland, rivers and great waterfalls and fountains and the waterways of kings' gardens, that people travel far to find beautiful, are beautiful for all the world. But my canal is beautiful for just me.

Its narrow stone-bound curve is hung over by uncared-for plane-trees, and by ragged, jagged, rickety, crooked houses, that lilt and tilt and lean together and over, dingy and dark. The rough cobbled quays have small traffic now, the litter of the canal's old life is gone from them. They are quiet, with no more rough calling and shouting of carters, and turmoil of hoofs and wheels. Sometimes, but rarely, a slow heavy flat canal boat is towed and poled along, through the locks and under the high black bridges. But most times the slow tawny water flows unbroken.

The tawny leaves of the plane-trees are fallen, and lie on the cobbles and in the water. The stems and branches of the plane-trees have black reflections in the water, with the reflections of crazy roofs and chimney-pots, and of tatters and rags of colour from windows and walls.

Sometimes in the mornings, these October mornings of sardius and topaz and sapphire, I find myself singing as I walk along the edge of my canal. It is so difficult not to be happy.

Hospital

My hospital was, all of it, built in the time that means lovely things of red-brick and grey stone and blue gables. The courtyards are paved with huge ancient cobbles, and there are grass plots that are green and wet, and big trees and bushes whose leaves are falling slowly in blue stillness.

There are more than two thousand sick in my hospital, six hundred wounded of the war, one hundred and fifty of them in our service.

I love to write "my" hospital and "our" service.

Madame Marthe

Hospital, Tuesday, October 19th

Things had been very bad all day. When night came it seemed dreadful to go away and leave so much suffering. I thought of the night, with fever and that special helplessness which belongs to the night.

I would have been so glad to stay the night out with the ward.

I said that to Madame Marthe, as we left together.

She said, "But why?"

She always has a cold and wears a little blue woollen cape over her blouse and apron. When she leaves the hospital she pins up the two black ribbon streamers of her cap of the tri-couleurs and wraps her arms around in the blue woollen cape. She looks very small and cold and poor.

"Why?" she asked.

The hospital is her world and she is thankful for every minute she can get away from it.

I leave my world to come to it.

I was ashamed to say to her, "It is for my own comfort I want to stay, to make myself imagine that I really am needed."

Hospital

Things They Say

Perhaps in other, different kinds of hospitals, hospitals of the little good sisters, or of ladies of the Red Cross, hospitals of beautiful influences, one could not love the men so much. In hospitals where the beautiful things of the Faith, prayers and tenderness and peace, are all around about the pain and death; and there are words for praise of courage and sacrifice, and words for sympathy and for hope, and words for high ideals; where it is as poets and painters and all people have always imagined it, perhaps one could not get quite this understanding of things that are not said, or come in so rough and vivid a way, upon unimagined things.

One loves to think of the wounded soldier with the nun beside him, and of the lady of the great world tending the peasant hero. One loves to hear of the men saying, "C'est pour la France."

Here there are no pictures I would dare call beautiful. It is crude and raw. And things are not said. When there is not too much suffering, it is rough. And when the suffering is great, it is all very dumb.

Here there is no one who knows how to word things. The men do not know, and the nurses do not know how to tell them. They all only just go on.

The nurses are poor women, of the people. They come, each one of them, from her own small desperate struggle for life, each from her own crushing deadening small miseries and cares, without any help of dream and vision, callously--one, just looking on, might think--to their work in the hospital. To the great magnificent suffering, each one of them comes dulled and hardened by some small sordid helpless suffering of her own. Everything has always been a struggle, and this is just part of it. They work on every day, and all day long, with no one to put into words for them, devotion and sacrifice. No one here speaks of those things, or thinks of them, or even knows.

When I see my little Madame Marthe, my chief, so very tired, I say to her, "You work so hard." And she always says, shrugging her thin round shoulders, "Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, i' faut b'en. Nous sommes là pour ça." If I dared to tell the patronne, who is intelligent to bitterness, that I admired this she did or that, she would say, "What of it, we are paid for that."

Odd how often it is the same thing that people say.

When I ask of a man with the Croix de Guerre what he did to win it, he always says, "Je n'ai fait que comme les autres."

A man going back does not say to us here that he is glad to have his life to offer again for his country. But he says that thing which makes me catch my breath with pride in him. "Je veux b'en. Tous les copains sont là."

They go off like that, to those places of death that they know already, wherein they have seen things we dare not imagine, and all they say about it is that all the copains are there.

There are not many of my ward who go back, ours are the very badly wounded, the men who are out of it.

The men have done all that they could do. Every one of them did all that he could do, and kept on doing it as long as he could. And when he could do no more, why then he was out of it, and it was for others to take up and go on with. He himself was done with it. He would rather not talk about it. It had been so bad that he does not want to talk about it. He does not want to think about it any more.

He would rather talk about things that used to happen "dans le pays," about the vines or the corn, or the fishing boat with oars or with sails, and "la vieille" and "les petiots."

"It is pretty bad?" I say, perhaps, to this one or that one, when I see how he is suffering.

I have never heard one of them say, "C'est pour la France."

But what they always, always say, all of them, is a thing I think very beautiful.

"You suffer much, my child?"

"Pas trop, Madame."

Always it is, "Not too much."

But sometimes it is too much, and they cannot bear it.

And when I look at the bed that used to be his, I think of him lying there trying to smile and to say that his suffering was not too much.

And the new man in the bed says those same words, as if it were a little formula always an answer to the question I cannot help asking.

"You suffer much?"

"Not too much, Madame."

Sometimes they say, "Ca va aller mieux."

"Ca ne va pas, mon petit?"

"Ca va aller mieux."

There is only one thing that is like the things one reads of. It is that the men, when they are very, very bad, always, always call for their mothers.

I remember reading that somewhere, and thinking it was just something somebody had thought pretty to write.

But it is one of the most true and simple and beautiful things that there can be in the world.

It is strange too. When they suffer desperately, they keep saying, "My mother, my poor mother," as if it were she who suffered. They seem to be grieving for her, not for themselves.

When they are frightened they call for her. Some of them are frightened of taking chloroform. They have fought and not been afraid, they would not be afraid to die, but chloroform is different.

Joseph opens the double doors of the ward and pushes the stretcher cart in and calls the number this or that.

He is all ready and waiting.

Joseph lifts him from the bed to the cart. I double a pillow under his head and wrap the blanket over, and follow.

The doors at the other side of the hall are closed, and I run ahead to open them, and shut them behind again after the cart.

If I can make an excuse I go down the corridor and wait also at the door of the operating room. I know the men hate to wait there alone. Sometimes there is very long to wait. And Joseph has to go to do other things.

Sometimes the door of the operating room is ajar, and one can see in a little, and that is horrible. People go in and out, the doctors, and Madame Laure, fetching and carrying things. The stretcher of the man who has been taken in is left pulled back against the wall, by that of the man who is waiting his turn. I stand very close to my cart and pat the blankets.

The men like to have one wait with them. There is a thing many of them say. It is a dull thing, and touching, as sometimes dull things are. They will say, over and over, "If you were not here, I should be alone. If you were not here, I should be alone."

But when the doctors come, with the chloroform, it is only of his mother the man thinks. He says, "Oh, maman! Oh, maman!" and keeps all the time saying it till he sleeps.

The adjutant, the new Number 12, says that you can hear them calling maman all the time when they lie wounded between the trenches, wounded and one cannot get to them to pick them up. He says it is the last word they call before they are still.

The Patronne

I take off my cloak and blue veil in the patronne's room.

The patronne is usually sitting at her desk. Sometimes she says good morning to me, and sometimes she doesn't.

She used to be fille de salle in this hospital, she used to clean these stairs and corridors; then she rose to be infirmière in the ward where I work now, and then panseuse. She is a huge gaunt raw-boned sorrel-coloured woman, who looks like a war-horse. She is so alive and quick that you feel her personality stronger than anything in the hospital, than anything, you think, anywhere. I have seen her seem stronger than death--driving death away.

When Number 17 was so very ill, I think it was she who drove death away from his bed. She worked and swore, and worked and swore. It was hideous. I laugh when I remember. Afterwards I found her outside in the corridor, sitting on the bench. He was going to get well. I cried; and she swore at me till I laughed.

Big red blotches come out on her arms when she is excited, and get purple when she is tired. If you visit the hospital, you do not know what to think of her. But if you work there you admire her, and are proud when she speaks to you kindly. It is an illumined day if by chance she says to you, "Bon jour, ma crotte."

Madame Marthe Again

I don't know at all how it happens that a little white mouse of a woman of the people, who has worked and worked all her life, and never been cared for by anybody, should have beautiful hands. But Madame Marthe has beautiful hands. Her hands are small and quick and absolutely sure. They tremble when things are bad, but in spite of that they are certain and sure. They never make a mistake. And they are not afraid of anything.

Sometimes my hands are afraid to touch things, and then I am ashamed. Sometimes I pretend not to see things that are fallen on the floor, and when she picks them up, I am so ashamed.

If my two hands were poisoned so that they had to be cut off, it would not make any difference. But what would the ward do if anything happened to the hands of Madame Marthe?

The Ward--All Souls' Day

There are twenty-eight beds against the walls of the ward and ten stretcher-beds down the middle of its long clear bright length. Between the beds there is no room to push the dressing cart about, it stands close up against the apparatus of dressings.

There are some things that make stains on the whiteness of the ward. When I am away from it, I see those things standing out against the whiteness.

There is the blue of the sublimé in the glass tank of the dressing cart, and there is the green of the liqueur de Labaraque in the big jar on the apparatus.

Sometimes there will be the light blue of a képi or the dark blue of a béret against the wall, hung on the knob at the top of a bed, or the red of a Zouave's cap.

There are the black squares of the slates over the beds. I can see, as if from any distance, the words scrawled in chalk on the slates: "Amp. de la cuisse gauche et de la jambe droite au dessous du genou." "Amp. du bras droit à l'épaule," and three "Xs" for the hemorrhages. "Plaie pénétrante poumon gauche, Op. 20 IX." "Brûlures gaz enflammé visage poitrine deux bras." "Eclat d'obus dans le ventre." "11 éclats d'obus côté gauche." And on and on like that, up one side of the ward and down the other.

Besides the black slates there are the placards, pale yellow, printed and written over that something may be known about the man on the bed.

And there are the pale yellow temperature charts, with the dreadful lines of fever that zigzag up and down.

There is exactly room between the beds for the night-tables; the chairs have been put all out into the corridors and heaped up against the wall opposite the lift. Madame Bayle is annoyed because they are in the way when the linen comes up. They are to be sent to the attics as soon as any one has time to see to it. But now no one has time.

Hospital, Thursday, November 11th

The sparrows were all talking together in the trees of the great central court of the hospital.

I met Madame Bayle as usual in the first court. We almost always meet there, as I arrive and she is crossing to the store-house on the other side of the entrance. Usually we stop and stand a minute, listening to the conversation of the sparrows.

Madame Bayle is the chief of the linen-room of our pavilion. She is a dreadful fat shining shuffling person, who hates me because I wear white shoes. Also because once I made her unlock the linen-room for me to take out some things I thought were mine, and the things were not mine, and she was angry with me. She is always trying to get me into trouble to pay me back. But we both love the birds in the courtyard. When we meet in the courts these days we say to one another, "Voilà nos pauvres petits pierrots!" and are friends for a moment.

This morning I ran past. I was afraid if I stopped she might give me news of my ward.

The buildings of the second court have not been militarised. It is the pavilion of the defective children. None of the children were out in the court this morning. The lights in their rooms were still burning, it was so dark a morning; I could see some of the children making up the rows of little cots, and some of them clearing away the bowls and pitchers from the long table. There are some who always sit with their hands in their laps and their heads hanging. They have dreadful little faces. Some of the children can do lessons a little, and some of them seem quite bright, and play always the same game, hands around in a ring, in a corner of the refectory.

The third court is for the wounded of our service. The recreation-room and various offices and kitchens open on to it, and the windows of the two storeys of wards look over it.

The lift was down, and Cordier called to me; but I ran past, and up the two flights of stairs, away from him as from Madame Bayle.

Cordier had been given charge of the lift. He is one of the wounded in the face. It is not his eyes. It is the lower part of his face. They are beginning to take off some of the bandages. He did not mind so much while the bandages quite hid it. But now he minds dreadfully. This morning I hated dreadfully the sounds he made calling to me. They say he will never be able to speak distinctly again. I was afraid he would be hurt because I ran by. But I would have known from his eyes if what I had dreaded had happened in my ward.

I took off my things in the patronne's bureau, and went across the passage to the door of the ward where I help every day with the surgical dressings.

It is always strange to open the door of the ward when one first comes on. So much may have happened in the night.

I stood outside the door. The door has glass panes that are washed over with white paint so one cannot see through. There are places where the paint has not held at the edges, and one can stoop and look in.

I could not see the bed of Number 29 from there, but I would know from the look of the men in the ward.

As I stooped, the patronne came out from the chief's bureau.

I heard her step and turned.

She said, "He is very bad. If they amputate he will probably die of the shock. It will have to be the left leg too, at the thigh. It is you who must tell him. If they do not do it he will die of poisoning certainly."

She stamped her foot at me and said, "Now don't look like that. You've got to tell him. He will take it better from you." The blotches of her arms were very purple. She said, "They are going to do it this morning. Go and tell him." Then she went back into the chief's bureau.

I went into the ward. I still could not see the Number 29 because of the hoop, like a little tent, that keeps the weight of the blankets from his legs.

Madame Marthe, the panseuse, was not in the ward. The infirmière, Madame Alice, was cleaning the night-tables down by the other door.

Every one called, "Bonjour, Madame; bonjour, Madame!"

"Bonjour, les embusqués!"

That is our great joke, that they are all embusqués.

I went across to Number 29 and looked at him over the hoop.

He was lying with his eyes wide open. They are like the eyes of deer and oxen. He is a very big man, very ugly, with an old scar over half of his face. Such an ugly, funny face; the shadow of death has no right to be upon such a ridiculous face. His face was made for making people laugh. He always kept the whole ward laughing. He used to make me laugh in the midst of his horrible pansements. No matter what he suffered, he never used to make a sound. I almost cannot bear it when they suffer silently. If they scream, I really don't care much. He used to try to wink at me to make me laugh.

I knew this about him, that his people are woodcutters in the mountains between the valleys of the Maurienne and the Tarentaise. I do not know why he went away to strange new countries. He must be thirty-five years old. In wildernesses he heard of the war three months after it began. He was wounded seven months ago, and was sent from hospital to hospital, getting always worse. He is not the sort of creature to be in a hospital. He looks absurd in a bed. He used to tell me of throwing one's blanket over a heap of pine boughs and sweet fern. He had much fever, and he would tell me about the clear, cool, perfect water of a certain forest spring.

I thought, standing there, how he would be wanting to drag himself into some hole of rocks and great tree-trunks, where no one saw.

The clock was striking eight. They would not begin to operate before ten. He would have to think of it for two hours, lying there. He looked at me very steadily. I thought, "It is I who must tell him, it is I who must tell him." He tried to wink at me, and then he shut his eyes. I thought, "I will wait a little."

I went to the apparatus in the middle of the ward and began to get things ready for the panseuse.

I tried to talk to the men in the beds near, the 9, Barbet, whose fever had gone down nicely; and 10, the pepère, who has had his right hand amputated; and 6 and 7 opposite, who are both young and gay and getting well fast. But I could not talk.

He is only one of thousands and thousands. In the hospitals, in the dreadful fields, along the roads, they are dying.

Those of the men who could sit up and use their hands were folding compresses.

Twenty-one started a song and some of the others took it up. They sing softly, many of them have very nice voices.

Père Mathurin
N'a pas de chaussons!
Il en aura;
Il n'en aura pas.
Roulons-le, Père Mathurin,
Roulons-le
Jusqu'à demain!

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.

Dans une brouette
Père Mathurin
Roulons-le
Jusqu'à demain.

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--

Père Mathurin,
Il en aura,
Il n'en aura pas----

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.