Chapter II: Part 2

During the first week in the hospital the sheer physical strain was terrific. It seemed as if I were in a strange, mad, nightmare world, where everything was reversed; instead of health--disease, and mangled and torn bodies and suppurating wounds, some of them hideously green and yellow, like decayed meat; and smashed wrecks of men, with arms and legs swung up on apparatus that resembled nothing so much as the old torture racks of the Inquisition; as if shrieks and cries and groans and smells were the natural and normal order of things. For days I was nauseated. The sight of raw mangled flesh, the blood-saturated linen, the stench of gangrenous wounds, the nervous strain of bandaging freshly amputated stumps, and the screams of the dressing hour simply bombarded the unaccustomed senses and hit the newcomer fairly in the pit of the stomach. When I confessed this to the ward surgeon he laughed.

“That’s nothing--the rebellion of healthy nature against disease. When I was at the Front, at the commencement of the war, at one of the base hospitals, I used to retire and gag at regular intervals. It was awful, for we had nothing to work with. But mobilize your emotions. Don’t let them mobilize you. Imitate the sang-froid of the _poilu_. Yesterday I stopped by the bed of a youngster who’s had a leg off and is dying of gangrene. ‘Well, how goes it?’ I asked him. ‘_Ça va. Ça va mieux._’--It goes. It goes better, he replied simply. And he was dead up to his waist already! He was a dead man he knew it, and he knew that I knew that he knew it; and still he looked me straight in the eye and said ‘It goes. It goes better!’ There’s mobilization of spirit for you!”

Nevertheless, when the dressings were over I breathed relief. Never did I learn to control my nerves completely; to listen without a tremor to the cries of pain, the high, piercing screams, “_Oh, là, là!_” “_Ah, Nom de Dieu!_” “_Ah, doucement, docteur!_ Easy there!” “_Oh, bon Dieu_, how I suffer!” The quality of pure agony in those broken cries was too much for me.

It was on trying occasions like these that Justin, the old French orderly, came to my aid, showing me exactly how to hold a broken leg; how to wind a difficult bandage with comfort and security; how to lift a heavy patient without injury to myself or to him.

Justin deserves a separate paragraph all to himself, a separate little niche in heaven. Kipling’s celebrated Gunga Din had nothing on him--for Gunga Din had no sense, only goodness; while Justin is a Frenchman, with all a Frenchman’s natural intelligence and sardonic humor. He had been an orderly in a French military hospital for twenty years; and what he did not know about sick humanity--their weakness and irritability, their heroisms and long, long patience--was not worth knowing. From morning to night he went trotting noiselessly about the ward in his old blue list slippers; dirty aproned; squat, ugly and strong as a gorilla; vulgar, gay, resolute and as tender-fingered as a woman. And the men leaned on him as on an elder brother.

All day long it was: “Justin, a basin--quick!” “Justin, lift me up!” “Justin, this plaster cast is killing me!” “Ah, Justin, how I suffer!”

And Justin’s steady, cheerful voice would reply: “I come, _mon enfant_.” “There, _mon petit_!” “That goes better, _mon petit brave, eh_?”

Once only did I see him in a passion. Some negligent person had bound a damp bandage too tightly about a fractured leg; drying, it contracted still further; the result was acute torture. The soldier, a modest, shy lad, had appealed once or twice to a passing nurse; but the first big morning rush of dressings was on and no one heeded him. Minutes passed. The pain increased. Silently he began to weep. It was old Justin trotting past with a pail of soiled dressings who first noted the writhing young figure and caught a faint groan. He paused long enough to inquire: “What’s the matter, _petit_?”

The soldier indicated his leg. The orderly’s face darkened as he looked. He set down the pail, undid the bandage and rewound it properly, muttering angrily between his teeth the while. Presently a nurse bore down upon them. She was the one whom the men had nicknamed the old _mitrailleuse_--for reasons obvious. Competent enough technically, she had neither tenderness nor humanity nor gay spirits to commend her services to the men. She was like a soured, fibrous old schoolmistress, and the soldiers detested her cordially and, after the fashion of mischievous school-children, amused themselves by devising fresh nicknames for her each day.

Frenchmen love charm in a woman, and hate the reverse like a deformity. Accordingly, when she paused belligerently at the bedside, both Justin and the lad instinctively stiffened themselves.

“What are you doing, Justin?” she cried sharply. “Let that bandage alone!”

For an orderly to dare to rewrap a certificated nurse’s bandage is, of course, a breach of etiquette. It is a situation that requires tact; but Justin at that moment was far too angry for tact. Stolidly he continued his task. When the last safety pin was refastened he straightened himself and faced the nurse squarely.

“Some imbecile, some _cochon_ of an _infirmière_,” he began, mentioning no names, “put a wet bandage on the leg of that poor child!” And then he continued suavely, in French--of which the nurse understood nothing beyond a few scattering words: “Ancient female camel! Daughter of the union of a cannon ball and a hippopotamus: Do you conceive that I, a Frenchman and a soldier, shall not do what is good for these, my little children? _Nom de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!_” And with a shrug of contempt he gathered up his slops and trotted away.

It was not long after this late one afternoon, when Justin beckoned me with a stealthy finger. By this time we had become firm allies. At noon I saved him a cup of wine from the men’s lunch and let him rest his aching feet and smoke a cigarette undisturbed behind a screen. And in return Justin taught me all the fine subtleties of his art.

“You are very amiable, mees,” he began now in a carefully lowered voice. “Will you help me?”

“What is it?” I asked; for by his conspirator air and his secrecy I knew he intended to achieve something, by his own initiative, which was against the rules.

“It’s Simondon, out on the _terrasse_,” he murmured, still in guarded tones. “His new cast hurts him. Last night he did not sleep for pain, and to-day the _pauvre petit_ has a temperature of thirty-nine. I’m going to take off that plaster and rewad it!”

“But why don’t you ask the nurse? It’s her job, really. You and I have no right to touch that cast without permission.”

“Simondon won’t let her come near. He’s crazy with the pain. They’ve decided to wait for the doctor. But the doctor is up in the operating room, and the Sacred Virgin alone knows when he will return.” He led the way to the terrace, a sleeping porch which gave on the garden.

I knew this Simondon. He had lost an eye and had a badly infected leg, due to four days and four nights spent on the field of battle, without food or water, before help came. As a consequence, of the five months spent in the hospital each separate hour had been a desperately fought struggle, a superb resistance of the spirit.

Small wonder that, after all these long months, the cool nerve that rarely deserts a Frenchman had worn down to rather a fine thread!

Upon the terrace we found him, a dark, painfully emaciated lad of twenty-one, his black hair already plentifully sprinkled with white from the hardships he had undergone. His cheeks were scarlet with fever, and in his torture he had bitten his lips until they were covered with a thin, bloody froth.

“No, no! You shan’t touch it!” he began fiercely as we came up.

“_Courage, mon petit brave!_” soothed Justin. “Ten minutes, and it’ll all be over and we’ll have you up in the wheel chair. Say, old _embusqué_! Will you have a small glass of cognac first?”

“Don’t you touch it!” breathed Simondon passionately between his teeth. “Get out of here!”

“Hold up his leg, mees!” commanded Justin calmly. “Thus!”

Obediently I held the leg, incased from thigh to heel in an open plaster cast, at the desired angle. Simondon let out a piercing yell.

“_Oh, bon Dieu! Oh, là, là! Wait!_” Tears of agony streamed down his wasted cheeks. Wildly he tried to seize my hands. “Can’t you hear me?” he sobbed. “Imbeciles! Stop!”

“Maybe we’d better,” I murmured.

But, with swift and sure precision, Justin had already begun to strip the bandages.

“Higher!” he ordered briefly.

Again Simondon made a furious swing at my wrists. Again he screamed madly.

“Let’s wait for the doctor,” I urged.

Justin never looked up.

“Don’t heed him, mees,” he said simply. “’Tis only his sickness speaking.” Wise old Justin! “Rest tranquil, _petit_,” he added; and he nodded to the young sufferer, who, suddenly docile beneath the firm, ministering hands, returned him a quivering smile of obedience. “It’s almost finished,” murmured Justin.

And indeed, in less time than it takes to tell, the cruelly binding plaster incasement was shed, extra layers of soft padding inserted, the cast readjusted and rebound; and Simondon, the tears still wet on his cheeks, was smiling happily and sipping a tiny glass of cognac. A half hour later, his fever abated and his red tasseled cap cocked rakishly over his one good eye, he was up in the wheel chair--for the first time in five months--and Justin was trundling him off for a brief promenade.

By the sheer authority of his spirit, the squat, grotesque, vulgar little old man had achieved in a few minutes what two nurses had labored vainly over for an hour. Shortly after he was on his rounds again, at his perpetual dog-trot, carrying a basin and making, as he passed me, his invariable joke--that he was taking a small gift to the Kaiser!

The first month in the big ward I was worked to death. But so was everybody else. Some of the nurses were ill, some of the auxiliaries were away, and an offensive was at its height. Consequently the rest of us worked under a terrific pressure. Ward Eighty-three, at that time the heaviest in the hospital, had over fifty beds, each one filled with a _grand blessé_. Fifty backs to wash; fifty beds to make; fifty dressings to cut down, change and rebandage; fifty bedside tables to scrub; fifty meals to serve on individual tables; fifty temperatures and pulses to take--to say nothing of a thousand and one odd jobs, such as hot compresses every hour, hot drinks, medicines, diets, wounds to irrigate, beds to disinfect, which kept nurses and aids racing dizzily straight through the day. And even then we were always behind our schedule! The work was never done.

If anyone is suffering from a broken heart or a general stagnation of life--what O. Henry called “slow pulse”--a big hospital ward during the rush of an offensive is a good place to lose it. But there are compensations; for a sick warrior is nothing after all but a sick child, docile, naïve, craving for sympathy. He wants to be consoled for his suffering; he wants to be cured. He demands everything and gives everything. And at night as I passed, dog tired, down the ward, heads were raised, hands outstretched; and the shower of cries of “_Bonsoir_, Mees!”--“_à demain_, Mees Californie!”--were sweeter than bouquets of roses thrown across the footlights to a reigning star.

There were twelve soldiers for whose welfare I was specifically responsible, and who had the right to call me to their bedsides and demand whatsoever they pleased, from an extra piece of cotton batting over their toes to the reasons why there are so many divorces in my country. Of these twelve, nine were under twenty-three and two looked not a day over sixteen, rosy cheeked and downy. After the first mists of strangeness had cleared away, and I began to view things more normally, that was the first thing that struck me--the amazing youth of the men. Despite their wounds and the stress of trench life in a brutal wintry climate, they fairly shouted life and vivid vitality. Their eyes were as clear as those of children, their laughter as fresh, their joy as spontaneous.

One morning I was washing the back of a young Breton lad whose torso, with its clean, flowing lines, would have delighted a sculptor.

“Claude,” I laughed, “you have a back almost as nice as Apollo’s.”

“Yes, mees? Truly?” he cried, blushing and deeply pleased.

I was puzzled by his delight, for Claude was a young coal miner who could not even sign his own name, and I knew he did not know Apollo from Moses. The next morning, as I was rubbing him down with alcohol, he twisted about to ask shyly:

“Mees Californie, is my back still as nice as Apollo’s?”

As I stared at him blankly he repeated the query in slightly different form; and then the truth dawned upon me: he thought Apollo was some other boy in the ward whose back didn’t have any bedsores!

It would be a great mistake to conclude that the ward of a military hospital, simply because it is the container of so much concentrated pain, is, therefore, the natural abode of sadness and gloom. In the first place, the soldiers, taken as a whole, are not sick: they are only wounded--a vast difference. Save for their injuries, the majority of them are practically well men. In the second place, they are young, and, speaking again, in the large, magnificently healthy.

Consequently the large airy ward, with its community of bedfast inhabitants, resembles a menagerie of fifty playful cubs--each chained to his own post, to be sure, but capable, nevertheless, of considerable mischief--rather than the classic conception of a sick room, with lowered lights and voices.

Pain there is, certainly, up to the limits of human endurance; but this is borne with a spirit, an ironic fortitude, which is a Frenchman’s most natural possession. A soldier suffering the refined tortures of hell during the dressing of an infected wound is yet capable of making a jest with twitching lips that will send his comrades off into spasms of laughter.

Nor is this humor an affectation. It is his instinctive reaction to pain. And, as a reverse side of the same shield, he is also capable at such times of the finest flower of courtesy, such as saying simply, “Thank you, doctor!” to the man who has just cut off his leg without ether.

But if he can and does endure intense pain superbly, it is no sign, as the schoolboys say, that he intends to endure lesser, or what he considers unnecessary ones, with like dignity. As a matter of fact, a pain in the great toe, a crease in the drawsheet, or, above all, that thing most dreaded by every Frenchman, a _courant d’air_ from an open window, will produce loud lamentation, which will set the entire ward in an uproar. For these are the small ills that can be righted, and therefore must be--and instantaneously, if you please.

An incident in point took place recently in the ward. The chief surgeon, when making his morning rounds, decided that a superficial incision of perhaps an inch should be made in a certain wound in order to permit the free passage of the Carrel-Dakin solution, the famous antiseptic irrigation which keeps down bacterial poisoning. It was not considered sufficiently important to remove the patient to the operating room, or even to administer ether. Three or four snips by the ward doctor and the thing would be done. But Georges, the party of the first part in the operation, had decided he wanted an anæsthetic. He did not intend to be hurt. He had understood that in this grand hospital _de luxe_ the Americans had the latest methods; that they did not chop a poor soldier up without first “putting him to sleep.” Vain were my efforts to soothe him.

The other men, delighted by this fantastic grievance--for most of them detest the anæsthetizing process--egged him on with a gayety that soon became riotous. They exchanged bets on the possible chances of recovery from such a grave operation. They promised to write to his mother and to his fiancée in the event of his death. One soldier, an erstwhile opera singer, consented to chant his mass. Another offered to confess him, and adjured him to make a clean breast of all his sins. At lunch, with their wine, they drank to him a solemn _morituri te salutamus_!

The day became a Fête of Death dedicated to Georges and his inch-long cut. And when at length the crucial hour arrived, and the doctor and nurse entered with a tray of glittering instruments, every man of them was up on his elbow in bed, and the opera singer began softly to chant the mass. But Georges was nowise abashed by all this jest and _blague_. As the doctor approached his bedside he began to writhe, and gasped:

“_Mon Dieu_, how I suffer! Oh! Ah! _Doucement!_--Gently!”

“_Un!_” murmured the opera singer at his side.

The nurse pulled down the covers and elicited another loud groan.

“_Oh, là, là! Doucement! Doucement!_”

“_Deux! Trois!_” counted his neighbor.

The ward meantime was one gurgle of suppressed laughter. The nurse started to undo the bandage.

“_Doucement!_” sang out Georges lustily.

“_Quatre!_”

The doctor picked up an instrument from the tray and touched the wound-opening tentatively.

“_Oh, Nom de Dieu! Oh, docteur! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement!_”

“_Cinq! Six! Sept!_”

“What’s biting you, old man?” laughed the doctor in English. “You know this doesn’t hurt.”

“_Doucement!_” roared Georges in reply.

“_Huit!_”

“I don’t understand this,” said the nurse, glancing at the chart. “He has no temperature.”

“_Doucement! Doucement!_” moaned Georges.

“_Neuf! Dix!_” registered the opera singer.

The doctor snipped off an infinitesimal flake of dead cuticle.

“_Oh, bon Dieu! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement! Oh, cher docteur! Doucement!_”

“_Onze! Douze! Treize! Quatorze! Quinze!_”

By this time the men were in a broad ripple of laughter--all save Georges, who continued to howl with every move the doctor made. But finally the operation was over. Doctor and nurse disappeared.

“How many?” I inquired.

“Twenty-eight!” grinned the opera singer.

Georges had screeched _Doucement!_ eight-and-twenty times inside of five minutes, at a practically painless operation! And now the opera singer began to mock him by singing _Doucement!_ in every conceivable accent up and down the scale.

“Son of generations of monkeys!” grunted Georges contemptuously. He turned to me: “A drop of cognac, mees! Regard how my hand trembles.”

And he lifted that member and waggled it before my eyes without the faintest glimmer of a smile. Needless to say, he got his cognac; he had earned it. The men had expected amusement and Georges had done his best not to disappoint them. Such a mirth provoker in a ward is worth any amount of drugs. Moreover, it is only justice to Georges to add that, in a subsequent operation, he had his leg taken off above the knee with a coolness, a gay devil-may-caredom that touched even his pain-hardened comrades. Upon that occasion never a single _Doucement_ fell from his lips. He was far more concerned over the noon meal he was forced to miss, and cursed like a pirate because he must lose both his lunch and his leg at the same fell clip!

But even Georges, with all his impudence and nerve, had his black moments, his fits of melancholy, of piercing nostalgia, of deadly ennui of the soul. _Cafard_ the soldiers call these seasons of gloom. “Blue devils” is our equivalent term. While the Russian muzhik says simply: “My soul suffers!”

The men dread this _cafard_ more than an operation. To fight off its approach they reread old letters, finger over beloved relics in their small sacks of personal belongings, smoke miles of cigarettes, read endless romances, or write up their simple histories--poor, meager, ill-spelled and laboriously penciled narratives of the individual rôles they played in the present mighty conflict.

But sooner or later the _cafard_, lying in wait, gets them. That Georges, however, witty, jeering, pungent as Javelle water, should fall a victim filled me with surprise. But one morning I came upon him with his head smothered under a pillow. And when I lifted it off, fancying him asleep, his young face startled me with its look of utter and naked misery, which he was too proud to show his little world.

“Why, what is the matter?” I cried.

He looked at me silently with brooding, gloom-filled eyes.

“I have the _cafard_,” he said simply at last.

Despite himself, his mouth quivered. Every one of those arid and sterile hours of his sickness had piled its heavy weight upon his soul.

“Ah, when will it all be finished?” he breathed. “When shall I see my mother, my little sister, again?”

For this I had no reply. Georges’ chances of recovery at that time were about fifty-fifty.

“Do you see that verse?” He pointed to the high clock tower of the hospital, which bore, in old French script, the following couplet:

_Every hour wounds;
The last one kills._

Georges repeated it slowly, with intense bitterness.

“The other day I counted how many hours I had lain couched here. Three thousand three hundred and twenty hours!” He held up to the light a yellow, emaciated hand. “Pretty, isn’t it? Every hour wounds, and the last one kills, eh? Well, I’ll take my killing all at once, thanks. I’m tired, you know. I’ll dispatch myself some day!”

A tender word on my part at that instant and Georges would have wept outright--and never forgiven me for disgracing him! I tried a joke--his own favorite weapon.

“Well,” I said, smiling, “if you want to die right away, this very minute, here’s a method.”

And I picked up from his bedside table a broken and rusted knife. It was his trench knife, a battered old wreck of an affair, the big blade of which was still crusted with dried blood--Georges’ own blood, spilt there when he got his wound, and carefully preserved by him as a souvenir. As a lethal instrument that knife was a joke, and I trusted he would see the point. But I underestimated the depth of blackness in his soul. For a long moment he stared at me, silent. Then suddenly, with a swift and violent movement, he tore open his chemise at the throat.

“_Voilà!_ There you are!” he exclaimed. I laid the knife out of reach in a hurry.

“_Peu!_” he said contemptuously, and turned his back on me.

It later appeared that the _cafard_ in this particular case had its origin in a girl. Following hard upon his operation, as soon as he could grasp a pen, Georges had written to his fiancée, telling her that he was now a cripple and releasing her from her engagement. And it seemed that the girl had taken him at his word. Not a single line had he received from her! And added bitterness lay in the fact that, deep down in the unplumbed depths of him, Georges had a fine upstanding confidence in himself, and believed that, cripple or no cripple, he was a pretty fine match for any girl.

As the days filed by without news he began to bleed inwardly. But one afternoon, shortly afterward, as I passed down the ward I beheld by Georges’ bedside her hand tightly locked in his, a small, pale-browed but radiant young person, in a heavy veil of black crêpe. Georges, exultant and gay, beckoned me over.

“_C’est ma fiancée!_” he introduced proudly.

Upon receipt of his letter she had waited only to bury a relative, and then hastened up from their native village to give him her reply in person.

In the hospital there were innumerable love affairs that came under my eye as the busy, monotonously diverse days flowed by; and the soldiers, one by one, made me their confidante while I wrapped their bandages, made their beds, or scrubbed the ingrained mud of the Somme from their feet with liquid soap and a flesh brush. But there is one that lingers in my mind because it became a game, half playful, half serious, between me and the soldier lover.

On visitors’ day the spacious _salle_ was always crowded by a throng of wives, mothers, sweethearts and friends. Before the big double doors were thrown open each soldier had his tiny pocket mirror out, combing his mustache and grooming himself for the occasion. Among these, I came to observe Coussin, a jeweler by trade, who, with his wife and small son of three, lived in Montmartre before the war.

Coussin was a quiet young man with an understanding eye and an unfailing sunny smile. I always hated to hurt him in dressing his wound, because it hurt him so to hurt me. As the hands of the clock approached two he would shift on his pillow so that his glance could reach the door without obstruction. He was one of those rare Frenchmen who do not smoke; and he would lie thus, motionless, a little pale from emotion, his eyes glued to that distant door. They never left it save to consult his watch. And when finally, on the stroke of two, his wife, Fabienne, appeared, a pretty, dark young woman, trimly veiled, pushing her son ahead of her, Coussin would lift himself abruptly out of bed--despite stern orders to the contrary, for there was still danger of hemorrhage--and wave his uninjured arm.

And Fabienne would lift her wee son for a salute to _Papa_! After which she would start down the long, crowded aisle. Smiling, her eyes still clinging to those of Coussin, she moved sedately, controlling her eagerness; but at the end she always ran. The kiss that followed was--well, indescribable. You will have to imagine it. And the look which they exchanged afterward was even more than a kiss, more passionate, tender, revealing.

As the afternoon drew on to a close the bell rang, warning the visitors that it was time to begin to get ready to think of departure. It was at this juncture that the comedy with Coussin began. Earlier in the day he had secretly set his watch half an hour back. If he could have got hold of a stick long enough to reach from his bed I am convinced he would have unblushingly turned back the hands of the ward clock to match, without a single compunction. As it was, he and Fabienne blandly ignored the first bell, as none of their private concerns. But when it rang again, and the orderlies began shooing the dilatory ones out into the corridor, Coussin would glance guilelessly at his watch, start, compare it hastily with the ward clock, and then exclaim with an air of surprise, mingled with indignation:

“Again too fast! But it is no good--that big old clock. This admirable little watch of mine has not been out a minute in five years!”

And Fabienne would regard lovingly the admirable little watch of her admirable little husband. In the end, of course, he won his extra half hour, and after the departure of his wife his timepiece and that of the ward would somehow mysteriously synchronize. But this was not quite all of the comedy. When the visitors had gone basins were passed round and the men bathed themselves before supper. But on the day of his wife’s visit Coussin always refused to bathe.

“I don’t wish to!” he would say with gentle obstinacy.

“But you must. It’s the rule. It’s good for you.”

“Not to-night. To-morrow.”

“But to-night it’s very necessary. Many visitors--many microbes.”

“I don’t wish to--to-night.” He would shake his head with smiling decision.

“But why don’t you want to wash to-night?” I asked him on the first occasion.

He gave me a single full look, and the truth dawned upon me: He did not wish to wash away the kisses of his wife and little son!

“To-morrow night I will wash twice!” he added magnanimously; and upon that we compromised.

There are certain French words--one can hardly call them slang--which have come into popular usage since the war, and which one hears constantly on the lips of the soldier. One of these is _pinard_, the trench word for wine, corresponding loosely to our term “booze.” Another is _copain_. A _copain_ is a pal, a chum, a trench comrade; one with whom a soldier shares his bed and his blanket and whiles away the long dull hours of inactivity. Not to have such a friend at the Front--or _là-bas_--Out There--as the soldiers call it--is a severe deprivation; for it means spiritual isolation; one puny soul bearing alone the terrific impact of the war. To illustrate this tender feeling toward a _copain_:

One day I was given the task of taking down the histories of the men in my ward; and I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that a postman, a quiet, drab, nondescript little man with a bald spot, had won both the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire. To me, his tale was astounding in its valor, for this timid, oldish little person seemed the sort to flee for his life, like a frightened rabbit, at the first big thunder of the guns.

It appeared that one night he had volunteered to go out upon the battlefield, still under French and German fire, to rescue a fallen soldier. While carrying his charge a shell exploded near at hand, injuring both his legs and wounding his companion afresh. At this point he might have saved himself by deserting his comrade. Instead of which, he remained all night beside him; made his dressings; fed him the dew that collected on the adjacent leaves, drop by drop; remained beside him throughout the following day, under constant bombardment; and at nightfall got him, like a sack of meal, up on his shoulders, and, crawling on his hands and knees, dragging his injured legs--“_Grâce à Dieu_ it was not my arms,” he said, “or I never could have made it!”--he eventually reached a dressing station, five kilometers away. But he had paid the toll of that long wait upon the infected field of glory. Gangrene set in and it was found necessary to amputate both feet. Never again could he be a postman.

“That was very splendid of you!” I said at the end of his recital.

“But no! But no!” he denied swiftly. “You see, ’twas my _copain_!”

There is still another word the war has brought into being; an epithet that, falling in anger from the lips of a soldier, is the supreme and ultimate insult. It is the word that has been coined to cover the case of the man who evades military service. _Embusqué_ is the French term. Literally it means one who hides in ambush. But practically it has come to embrace all who, through graft or influence, hide in easy administrative jobs, soft snaps, sinecures, saving their pusillanimous skins instead of taking their chances with their fellows in the trenches. The contempt for this particular brand of coward is great, and insults are extremely likely to be the portion of any civilian who walks the streets of Paris these days in mufti.

An American ambulance driver on the field service at Verdun told me that, on a recent _permission_ in Paris, he had taken all his uniforms to the tailor to be cleaned.

“It seemed bully,” he said, “to have a real American all-over bath and get into real American clothes again--that is, it seemed bully until I ventured out upon the boulevards _en civile_. But presently I began to hear ‘_Embusqué!_’ ‘_Embusqué!_’ all round me in the air. Sometimes it was hurled in my face in passing; sometimes it was hissed close to my ear. And finally there approached four _poilus_ abreast, _mutilé_ every one, taking the entire width of the pavement, stumping along on their wooden pegs, gay as larks, and chattering seventeen to the dozen. Convalescents, I figured them, out on their promenade. When they came alongside, naturally I gave them the road. But they halted, confronted me contemptuously, and cried: ‘_Embusqué! Embusqué vous!_’ Well, it was too much for me. I beat it back to the tailor and got into respectable clothes.”

Like many opprobrious epithets, however, _embusqué_, among friends, has a different slant; used thus, it becomes a term of endearment, a sort of rough caress. A soldier, fresh Out There, muddy-booted, unshaved, bristling with the accouterments of war, will clump awkwardly into the hospital, bend over his wounded comrade, salute him on both cheeks, and exclaim jovially: “Well, old _embusqué_, how goes it?” And on the morning following my weekly afternoon off the men never failed to greet me: “Aha, Mees _Embusqué_! You deserted us yesterday. _Embusqué vous!_”

Used so, it was a term of affection. Nevertheless, it is a word to be handled with discretion. Returning from the hospital late one night to my quiet hotel, I found the place in a tumult. The police had invaded the kitchen; and the Dutch chef, a stout, pompous white-capped tyrant, before whom the entire establishment walked in terror, lay on the floor with his head smashed in, weltering in his own gore. Over him stood the head waiter, a tiny sprite of a Frenchman, hands clenched, eyes blazing, and looking ready to jump on the chef’s fat stomach if that prostrate gentleman so much as batted an eyelid.

“What’s the matter?” I inquired.

“He--he called me _embusqué_! Me!” exploded the head waiter, stammering in his rage. “I knocked the fat swine down and his head hit the stove.”

The police, upon hearing the provocation, vindicated the servant completely, and the Dutchman went to the hospital to mend his head and his manners. It was another version of Owen Wister’s famous Western tale: “When you call me that--smile!”

At the end of three months I was transferred to another ward with only twelve beds--a small, tranquil family, it seemed to me, after the continual rush and hurry of the big receiving ward. But still there was plenty to do. No time to sit like a lady, with folded lilylike hands. And the first three days, in addition to the regular routine, I had a dying man in charge. For three days and three nights he lay dying from general gas infection, a poor wreck, too ghastly to look upon with composure. His face, under the process of decay, had turned a horrible greenish yellow; beneath one eye yawned a deep unhealed bayonet gash; his mouth was filled with poisonous ulcers; and his tongue was so swollen that he could scarce articulate.

One leg had been amputated at the thigh in a vain effort to arrest the gangrene; but the infection had immediately showed in the other leg. The stench of this moribund organism was such that, with every window flung wide open, the odor was still almost overpowering. And the danger of infection was no imaginary fear. A nurse, with her hands tender from being constantly in water, is always crocking off bits of superficial skin.

Conceive the daily dressing and bandaging of this poor wretch; the daily changing of linen, soaked through and through with deadly suppurations, down to the very mattress! In touching him the doctor, the nurse and the orderlies wore gloves; so, also, did I whenever that was possible. But at this time there was a temporary shortage of nurses and I had the ward to myself, save when the head nurse looked in for a minute to ask if all went well. And perhaps I would be busy when the cry would come:

“Mees! Mees! Number Two! A drink! Quick!”

Upon which I would drop everything in a panic and fly to his bedside, barely in time to prevent him from swallowing the contents of the spittoon; for he had long, lean, powerful arms, this Number Two, which were always wandering, always in motion. With these he would pull into his bed whatever of the adjacent landscape he could lay hands on; for this reason we were forced to discard the bedside screens that usually inclose the dying. Once this blind, wandering hand discovered a thermometer on the bedside table of a neighbor. Instantly it was in his mouth and was broken in two between his teeth. Nothing for it but to thrust in my bare hand and pull the pieces out. No time for rubber gloves! He might die of gas gangrene; but I was not going to have him die of a thermometer.

Happily he did not suffer and at times he was conscious. Once, as I held up his head--this time with gloves--to give him water, he looked into my eyes and said, quite matter-of-factly:

“_C’est la fin, n’est-ce’pas?_”--It’s the end, isn’t it?

As he lingered and still lingered on, there came a subtle change over the attitude of the ward with regard to this long-spun-out dying. At first, when, after what seemed to them a proper and suitable length of time, Number Two still stubbornly held on, complaints began to be heard. No Frenchman loves an open window. Were they all to die of colds in the head because of one inconsiderate fellow? Frankly, they had had enough of him. It was not courteous to linger thus!

“_Bon Dieu_, not yet? Will he go to-night, think you?” they would impatiently inquire.

But as the feeble flame still burned mysteriously on, unquenched, this feeling gradually altered; it merged into a wondering awe and respect. The gallant fight of Number Two, his gaspings, his wrestlings with the invisible foe, commanded their admiration.

“How strong he is!” they would murmur respectfully, “What force!”

“’Tis the force of youth,” commented another.

“’Tis sad to die like that, so young, so brave--_n’est-ce-pas_, mees?”

And when the final spells of periodic shuddering began, showing the last phase was at hand, they watched him with undisguised interest.

“He’s passing!” announced one.

“Not yet,” retorted another, almost with pride. “See him drink! _Pauvre brave!_ ’Tis a good warrior.”

“He’ll go to-night--that’s sure!”

They began to argue about it.

But he did not go that night, nor yet the next morning; and the afternoon found him still battling feebly for breath. Late in the afternoon of the third day his wife arrived, a shabby, terrified little peasant woman, infinitely pathetic in her rusty black crêpe and her gnarled toil-worn hands. Accompanying her was the soldier’s father, a gaunt Breton, in smock and wooden shoes, with a small, round beribboned hat like that of a priest, and beneath it deep-set, intelligent eyes.

Upon me devolved the unpleasant task of breaking the news. I led them out into the corridor and, for a space, I could find no words. What is the polite formula in such a case, anyhow? Perhaps the wife read the trouble in my face, for her eyes upon me were like those of a dog, piteous, begging not to be beaten. She grasped me by both elbows.

“How goes it?” she breathed. “He is better? Say that my husband is better!”

The situation was intolerable.

“He is dying,” I blurted out brutally.

With a loud cry she flung herself into my arms. The father gazed stonily out the window. Soon, however, she had composed herself, and I asked whether they wished a priest. Was her husband a Catholic? Briefly they conferred apart, and then the woman turned, with a timid query. Would it cost anything? And with that the whole bleak truth came out. They were poor, very poor, it appeared; so poor, indeed, that they had sold their cow to enable them to come to Paris.

They had counted the expenses down to the last sou; but they had not counted the expense of a priest.

I assured them we had an abbé in the hospital and that his services were free. Upon which they decided to have him. An hour later he celebrated Holy Communion, the soldiers looking on with simple, unaffected interest. Only one blemish marred the serenity of the sacred event: At the crucial moment Number Two absolutely refused to receive the Host. Twice the murmuring abbé bent over him and inserted the holy wafer, and twice it was rejected by the swollen lips.

“Let’s try it with water,” I suggested.

The dying man drank thirstily as ever, but again refused the symbol. I was nonplused, for plainly those black eyes staring up into mine were conscious. After the departure of the abbé a soldier beckoned me to his side.

“He’s not a Catholic,” he explained softly.

As daylight waned there came a brief respite in the struggle; Number Two breathed more easily; he lay quiet, relaxed; his invisible antagonist seemed to have removed a short way off. The men meantime chatted cheerfully. Some sang.

Presently a knock sounded at the door. It was the X-ray man from upstairs, who had come to take a photograph of a certain plaster cast, an extraordinarily fine specimen, made at the Front.

“Who’s the new _blessé_ with the leg cast?” he called out jovially. He consulted a card. “Peletier’s the name.”

“Present!” came a voice from the corner.

“But you can’t take a picture now!” I protested, scandalized. “A man’s dying in here. Wait until he’s dead.”

“Can’t! The cast comes off to-morrow morning. Got to take the picture right away. Here’s the order.”

Perforce I let him come in. And now a lively bustle ensued. The bed containing the soldier adorned with the desired cast was wheeled into the center of the room, the leg exposed to the best advantage, bandages unwrapped, the bedcovers composed neatly, the tripod set up, the lights arranged.

Then the photographer’s head disappeared beneath the black camera cloth. It would be vain to deny that the men enjoyed it hugely. They watched with eagerness as the photographer’s head emerged from the dark folds. He altered slightly the position of the cast, looked again, and made a second change.

“Good!” he exclaimed at length briskly; and he held up a warning hand. “Now! Ready, old man! Tell your leg to smile! Tell it to regard the little bird.”

At this threadbare joke a veritable shout of laughter went up from the ward. Even the dying man smiled!

“_Regardez!_ He smiles!” cried a soldier, pointing. “_Bon garçon!_”

The mirth renewed itself. It was the strangest death scene I had ever viewed.

Number Two lingered through the night and slipped away the next morning so quietly that none of us knew the exact moment; and his strength and his smile at the photographer’s jest became a legend in the ward.

There is much talk nowadays of the great number of desertions, and one’s fancy is fed by all kinds of wild and fantastic tales. Most of them are pure inventions, or have grown, like snowballs rolling down hill, from the merest innocent fact. The French are not deserters by temperament. One does not hear of whole companies of Frenchmen, bereft of their officers, falling on their knees, lifting up their hands, and crying: “_Kamerad!_ Spare me; for I am a father!” Simply, that is not the French note. To drag in his papahood at such a moment would appear to a Frenchman as grotesquely humorous and absurd.

And yet it would be idle to assert that there have been no French desertions. But most of them are pathological cases. The human brain can experience just so much bloodshed, so much killing, without going a little mad. And the more sensitive, finely tempered and humanitarian the person, the heavier the spiritual strain.

The following story is a case in point. It was told me by the would-be deserter himself, a young playwright of twenty-four, called, let us say, Vernier, who had been invalided back to Paris. He related it with a certain mordant humor, as being something of a joke on himself. The background of the story, his repeated wounds and illnesses, his hatred of killing, which grew with the months into a morbid soul sickness, were supplied by his mother and a friend:

Vernier, nervous, high-strung, idealistic, had been in the war since the days of mobilization. Repeatedly wounded, but never gravely, constantly ill from exposure, he gravitated back and forth between the trenches and the hospitals, not remaining very long at a time in either. He took part in a number of attacks and killed a number of Germans. He didn’t like it. About Christmas he wrote to his mother: “To be a really successful trench warrior one should be made of pig iron clean through: no head, no heart, no nerves!” And he added: “Frankly I am sick, sick, sick to death of it all.”

Shortly after this he was wounded again and went to the hospital; a month later he was back in the lines. Threatened with a relapse, he was sent to a shelter behind the trenches. And here the breakdown came. Fortunately his mother was with him. To her Vernier declared he had killed his last man in battle. He swore a solemn oath never to take another human life. He was through! He was going to clear out, escape to Canada, become a farmer and start life anew.

He spoke wildly, passionately, in tones that carried far beyond the small room. His mother listened, gray with terror. She implored him not to be foolish, to hush, to speak lower; to consider himself, his mother, France. Vernier, however, remained firm.

“But they’ll shoot you, my son, as a deserter!”

And to this Vernier vehemently replied:

“Mother, can’t you conceive that it’s more honorable to stand up against a wall and die publicly for your faith than to die like a dog in a hole in the ground for something you don’t believe? No; I’ve killed my last man, I tell you! If they want to kill me for that let them kill.”

Frenzied, the mother flung herself upon him, trying to stifle with her hand that dangerous young mouth; but the damage was already done. His loud speech had been overheard. Within the hour he was summoned before the commandant and asked whether the charge were true. Far from denying, Vernier admitted everything up to the hilt; he even went farther and embroidered his point of view. The commandant listened attentively; and at the end he spoke.

“He told me,” related Vernier in excellent English, “that in ordinary circumstances I should be shot the next morning as a deserter--and thus achieve what was so evidently my desire. But there was somebody else to be considered--namely, my mother. For, in overhearing me, they had overheard her entreaties as well. The son of such a mother must be worth saving; and, therefore, he was returning my life, plainly forfeit, to this brave mother of France. But he named a condition. And after that,” continued Vernier with a reminiscent grin, “he simply cut loose and lit into me. Asked ironically whether I supposed I was the only man in France who was opposed to the shedding of blood! I was a socialist, eh? Well, he was a philosophic anarchist! Went me one stronger, you see.”

And this was the commandant’s condition: He asked Vernier to remember that this bloody war was a trial, not to him alone but to all Frenchmen with a spiritual nature; and, as they were strong for the common good, he asked Vernier to be strong also--and hold his tongue. Simply that--to be strong and hold his tongue! And to this Vernier consented. He had to, he said, after the commandant’s courtesy to his mother. And, also, he was not going to be outdone in delicacy. When last heard of, Vernier was still holding his tongue Out There.

There was one question the soldiers asked constantly. They began the first day I entered the hospital; and I had no reply. On the last day they were still asking it; and still I had no reply. That question was: When will the United States enter the war?

Observe the form of that question. They did not say If, but When? For to most of them it seemed inevitable that, sooner or later, we, the big sister republic, with kindred form of government and ideals, should come to see what France, with her fine lucidity, had seen for so long: that she is battling not alone for her own right to exist as a free, unenslaved nation--though assuredly she is doing that--but for America also, and for the doctrine of democracy, as opposed to the doctrines of force and the gauntleted fist, all over the world.

But also, quite aside from this, the French soldiers want us to come in because they like us personally. They like us and they want us to fight upon their side.

Not long ago Georges expressed these sentiments in a nutshell. He had been lying staring up at the Stars and Stripes, which, with the Tricolor, was tacked above the ward door.

“It’s pretty,” he remarked pensively, “that starry flag. It’s not bad at all, truly! And it goes well with ours. It would be pleasant to see them both flying at large over Verdun--_n’est-ce-pas_, mees?”

As I write this, that wish of a wounded French soldier boy has come true.

MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING

“Watch that man!” said the nurse to her volunteer aid, nodding toward a bed that had been tilted at an angle by means of wooden blocks inserted under the legs, so that its occupant, a wounded Frenchman, lay downhill, his feet higher than his head. He looked as if he were past the need of watching and were dead already, that rigid, immobile, white-draped figure. His face was a livid mask, with heavy shadows beneath the closed lids, pinched nostrils, deep carved lines of pain round the bluish mouth, and a black unkempt bristle of beard that showed up startlingly against the white of the pillows. Not a movement, not a stir or visible breath or touch of warm living color. He was a fresh arrival, thirty-six hours from Verdun, and in the morning--if he lasted that long!--he was going up for operation. Both of his legs were broken above the knees.

“Watch that man!” warned the nurse again from the door. “I’m going off duty for two hours. Lord, I’m tired!”

“Oh, I’ll watch him all right,” promised the young aid confidently. “That’s what I’m here for,” she added with dreamy sweetness.

The nurse walked over to the bed, bent down and took the soldier’s pulse.

“He seems all right,” she murmured dubiously. “Pretty weak. Well, keep an eye on him.” She sighed a sigh of pure fatigue and departed.

Left to herself, the auxiliary fussed about the ward for a few minutes, after which she, too, crossed to the bedside of the man on whom she had been commanded to keep an eye. For a space she stood staring down watchfully upon him. That was what she had been told to do, and she did it conscientiously.

Then, her duty performed, she returned to her seat at the table and commenced a letter to a girl friend. And while she is thus engaged, and the stage is set for action--and probably tragic action--let me give a brief thumbnail sketch of her.

It was a big war hospital in France, and the volunteer aid was a girl from the Middle West who, in a fine white flame of enthusiasm for the Allied cause, had come all the way from her native town as fast as train and ship could bear her in order to nurse the fine, brave, glorious and magnificent French soldiers. For it was with such glowing adjectives that she described them, and she could not even think of them without springing tears. The dear, rugged, war-torn heroes, flat upon beds of pain, with romantic white bandages bound about their brows, gazing up at her with unutterable gratitude in their dying eyes. For it was thus, movie-wise, she pictured them; and she pictured herself as a nurse, a sort of ministering-angel-of-mercy ingénue cast, divinely compassionate, dressed for the part in pure spotless white garments, on her head that very becoming French coif--it had looked so attractive in the pictures; she really must have one of them--bending over a dying _poilu_, soothing his fevered brow with cool white fingers, murmuring gentle words of hope, promising to write to his mother, and finally kissing him good-by into Heaven. She had read of nurses doing that, of soldiers whispering faintly, “Kiss me good-by for my mother!” And she knew--she had a sure instinct--that she would be good in that part. For, as she told her girl friend, she had so much sympathy and tenderness in her nature!