Chapter II: Part 2

The narrative of these particulars produced a worse effect upon Odette than tidings of death; the more as some one had the lightness to say in her presence: "Much better to be shot dead at an unexpected moment than to endure such long and cruel agony."

"That is a fine idea!" retorted Odette. "Much better to be alive than dead."

Notwithstanding the sadness of these visits of friends when there was always some new death to weep for, deaths which had occurred under the most frightful circumstances, Odette felt that no other sorrow was equal to her sorrow; and she detested them all, not as losses hateful to endure, not as making part of a national calamity the like of which had never been before, but as unwelcome events intruding themselves between her and her own grief. She desired to be alone with her sorrow, and she resolved henceforth to know nothing of all the rest.

One idea possessed her during several days: to see the place where Jean lay buried. Oh! if she could also see that where he received his death-blow! She appealed to three or four influential persons of her acquaintance, hung over the telephone. What she asked was to the last degree impossible. Word came to her from the Minister that it would be easier for her to go to Berlin, passing through Switzerland after procuring the necessary papers, than to reach her husband's tomb, near as it was. Then it seemed to her that the government, even more than death, had robbed her of her husband by means never practised before, the refined cruelty of which had been invented for her alone.

V

Her old friend, La Villaumer, had come to make her a brief visit of condolence. He was the only man of their former group of intimates left in Paris, because of his years. Now he came to see her again.

"I do not come seeking to console you, my friend. If I am making a mistake, turn me to the door. In my mind there is no consolation for you; you are an unfortunate woman. You must not ask much of life, do you see? You have known happiness. To most people happiness is unknown. Let those to whom it is a stranger deceive themselves with words and attitudes; as for you, weep for all you have lost; weep; what you have lost is worth all tears."

"Thank you, my friend; do not feel that you are obliged to make a heroine of me, you of all others! You know, of all others, that I am not a heroic soul, but simply a woman who loves."

"You are the purest woman whom I have known, in the sense that you are the most natural. You were born in a terrestrial paradise, and until now you have lived in one. You have not been put outside the gate for some misdeed by the angel with the fiery sword; a hurricane has arisen and devastated the garden."

"But I am none the less outside of the gate!"

"I recognize that. There would be no use in seeking to deny it, and it is all in vain to say to you that if others are less vividly aware of being outside the gate it is because they never lived in the garden, like you."

"But they tell me that everything is changed."

"They are right, and you see it clearly because you are outside of Eden, which you had never left before. It is only that some of them accept the change quickly because they were prepared for it, and others because they are less sensitive than you."

"Then, if such a change exists, does that mean that I should cease to mourn my husband?"

"No; but the day will come when you will mourn him more. Remember what I say: you will mourn him more. That is the way in which you will take your part in the change."

"More!" ejaculated Odette. "Is it possible? I do not understand you."

"I mean by 'more' another manner of mourning, which you will doubtless find more endurable. Let us not talk more about it now, but keep in mind what I have said."

She shrank more and more from society, till she could endure neither news nor the face of a friend. She caused herself to be denied at the door--forbade her maid to speak to her of the war, even to bring in the newspapers. She wished to hear nothing.

Then Paris became odious to her because she could not keep herself sufficiently in retirement. Since she was not permitted to go and stretch herself upon Jean's tomb, like a faithful dog, she decided to seek a refuge where she could think only of Jean, weep for him in solitude, live only in his memory, stun herself with her own grief, give herself body and soul to this grief from which no earthly power had the right to tear her.

She thought of returning to Surville, where Jean had bidden her good-by, where she had spent those last weeks with him, those beloved days of the end of the world. To find herself there in present circumstances would be atrocious pain; so much the better! There was only one sort of torture that she feared; that which should forbid her to live in intimate union with the memory of Jean. To suffer, to suffer even to martyrdom, to the martyrdom which Jean's death was causing her, this was the greatest good for which she could ask.

Odette set out for Surville.

VI

It was the end of October. The war, still violent and deadly along all that line of conflict which was called the battle of the Aisne, was becoming more terrible in the north, and was being carried over into Belgium, as at the beginning. Universal anguish, for a time checked by the victory of the Marne, was as acute as in the first days. Surville, on the seashore, could not but be deserted and sad at this season. The Hôtel de Normandie closed, the public houses that were open far from comfortable, the best way to be alone and not hear war talk from morning till night was to rent a small villa. A pavilion was recommended; it was separated from the street by a row of poplars with yellowing foliage and a narrow grass-plot where two pergolas were in summer covered with climbing roses. At this season the dull melancholy of this abode was accentuated by the silence of the dead town. Odette found that it suited her. No sooner had she arrived than she had made a pilgrimage under the closed windows and drawn-down blinds of the room that she had occupied with Jean. The wind was blowing from the country, driving the heavy clouds out to sea; the old Casino, once so gay, was boarded up; at the door there still hung a poster announcing the races. Odette followed the alley, passed over the dunes between the deserted tennis-courts, and went down to the beach, where she could indulge in the bitterness of unmingled grief.

This was where she had planted her tent and lived with Jean through a fortnight of sunny days, in utter abandonment to a delight that arose from the earth or fell down from the magnificent sky. Children had been playing about; excited little dogs had been barking to coax them to throw a pebble into the sea. They had ceased their indolent repose only to plunge into the sea, swimming side by side with delight.

To-day the beach was abandoned, and seemed to stretch away, gray and monotonous, to the end of the world. Odette seated herself under the shelter of the dune and uttered the beloved name of Jean. The raging wind carried it, like a flake of foam, toward that distant Havre where a number of transports were lying in the roadstead. The coachman who brought her from the train had pointed them out to her: they had brought over British troops; an average of fifty to fifty-five vessels was arriving every day. The war! Here, too, here again, when she had hardly left the train, she had been reminded of it.

Nevertheless, the hours passed and no one spoke of it, to her at least. The monotonous sound of the sea soothed her, and the sea, notwithstanding the troop-ships over there, seemed like something grand, entirely foreign to all the human butchery. Odette rested her eyes on the limitless plain, ever restless and sad. But this sadness was allied to her own, and at the same time something immense, majestic, and superhuman seemed to enter the depths of her still rudimentary consciousness of the dawn of a new time. She would have remained there for hours if the approach of evening had not rendered intolerable the sense of despair suggested by the scene, and if the rain had not begun to fall in torrents.

Odette took one of the paths leading back to the town.

Hardly had she reached it when she was surprised to see through the driving wind and rain that buffeted her, many illuminated buildings where she had expected only the shadows of a sleeping city. That was the Casino, which she had lately seen shut up by boards! And that was the Grand Hotel, all twinkling with light! She had to round the corner of the latter to reach her cottage, and by degrees as she approached it she saw a swarm of human beings, became aware of a commotion in the vast building which had seemed so funereal. Men with bandaged heads, with arms in slings, men walking on crutches; and the white head-dresses and red crosses of nurses; it was a hospital. The wind brought its odors to her--the smell of tincture of iodine, of cooking and an indescribable unsavoriness.

She drew near, passed beneath the windows. The sight was not so heart-breaking as she would have expected. The nurses, some of them young, wore a smile; if certain wounded men were stretched out, inert, others, seated on their beds, were quietly chatting, calling across to one another; a great burst of boyish laughter took her by surprise, while at the same moment she saw, close-pressed to the window-pane, directly under the electric light, the pitiful, waxen face of a sort of Lazarus rising from the tomb. She became aware that the other building, opposite, was equally crowded; she saw at the door an orderly in uniform, and the inscription on white linen: "Supplementary Hospital." She had thought to flee from the war; everything was bringing it to her. The pavilion that she had selected, with its green lawns, its poplars, its pergolas, was situated not far from these hospitals. All day long she would see only men who had been in the war!

Somewhat disheartened, she returned home. It was not what she had expected to find here. Two telegrams were awaiting her; she opened them listlessly--no news could be of serious moment to her. Both of them announced the death of young men whom she knew intimately, old friends of her husband; the first, an aviator crushed under his machine; the second, killed on the banks of the Yser.

The next morning several letters brought to her details of this twofold loss. The first of these young men, whom she remembered to have had at her house not three months before, had joined in aerial conflict with an enemy machine, at an altitude of two thousand metres; despairing of overcoming it by shots of grape, he had dashed upon it, crushing his own screw, but had also seen his adversary wrecked as they fell to earth together. It was one of the first exploits of the kind; its effect upon the imagination was great. The other victim of the day, an officer by profession, after having his shoulder crushed and his useless arm bound to his body by withes, had continued for an hour to command his company, until a bomb had scattered him in fragments.

Odette shuddered. The heroism touched her, as it touched every one; but these fine deeds, these multiplied deaths, overshadowed the case of her husband, blotted it out; the death of Lieutenant Jacquelin was fading from the general memory; other deaths were making more of a stir than his; as the war became more and more furious it seemed to relegate its earlier stages to a long-past time, somewhat inferior to the later tragedy. Lieutenant Jacquelin had been killed in the first days of the war, of a war still fought in old-fashioned way. The miseries of the trenches under the autumn rains was another sort of war, one which alone seemed to be true war. The headlong rush of the enemy on the Yser, of which people were better informed than of the earlier invasion at the Marne, arrested and absorbed the public mind. Odette felt this, and though she was determined that no thought of glory should mingle with her grief, the idea of glory and of the gigantic struggle that was going on did penetrate her mind in spite of herself, by reason of the diminution which the prestige of her own hero was suffering. She had never dreamed of finding a cause of pride in what he had done; one single thought had absorbed her: that her Jean, her love, was dead. In her wounded pride she was hurried into saying to herself: "He died nobly, he had a beautiful death, he too!" Yet the universal chorus seemed to reply: "Since him, others have done better."

She wrote to her newly widowed friends in words of exaggerated praise, affecting not to speak at all of her personal sorrow. It was a gratuitous effusion of temper, for the widows did not find her praises at all extravagant, and never observed Odette's reserve as to her own case.

She decided not to leave the house, that she might see nothing, hear nothing, learn nothing. For a while she even thought of notifying the post-office not to forward her correspondence; but she was always hoping that the Minister would send her a permit to visit Jean's grave. Jealously she shut herself up with the memory of her husband.

Everything irritated her; everything was odious to her; everything seemed to conspire to raise between her and the beloved memory a barrier of bleeding corpses, a screen upon which were portrayed horrors invented by a satanic imagination, together with sentences of exalted morality unknown to her and whose new radiance blinded her.

Stamping her foot, tearing the handkerchief with which she was stanching her tears, she declared to herself that she would henceforth live only for Jean and by him. She kissed the photographs that she had brought with her. She stretched herself upon a lounge, engulfing herself in the torturing memory of him. For one day, several days, a week, perhaps longer, she would be able to live upon only the thought of him. She would open neither letters nor despatches that might come; if she was late with her condolences, her congratulations, what did it matter?

The idea of military glory entered her mind and suggested to her the hope of erecting a monument to her husband. She was caressing the thought when her maid entered her room like a gust of wind.

"Madame, the wounded! the wounded! Swarms of them! In automobiles, on trucks; it appears that there are twice as many for Sousville, and the train has carried as many more to Houlgate and Cabourg!"

Amelia threw open the windows. The train of wounded men was passing the house. Odette dared not forbid herself to look at it.

Autos were rumbling by, some of them covered, others displaying to the light of day a heap of men, motionless, bandaged, covered with clay, an agglutinated mass of flesh in which all individuality if not all life seemed to be held in suspense, a cart-load of humanity: not a single man but a mass of bloody pulp in which the suffering that it covered must be a common suffering. Then came a truck, two trucks, three. They were great drays across which were placed stretchers, and on these stretchers were extended what they call the bedded wounded, those whose legs are broken, or already amputated, or dreadfully crushed, those fever-stricken from projectiles received in the body, those with cloven skulls, hastily bound together. They were marine gunners, foot-soldiers, blacks; tall, handsome, Moroccans with brown skins. Distinguished from all the others by excess of ill fortune, they were stretched out, straight and rigid like corpses placed in order, at equal distances, upon the marble slabs of a morgue. The trucks going at a walk and carrying the most seriously wounded, at each check, each halt, each starting again, one could hear hollow moans; sometimes the outcry of a Moroccan, sharp like the voice of a child or a woman, would make you catch your breath, and the country folk, crowded along the sidewalks, would whimper as if they themselves were being tortured.

Amelia, who in the beginning had been chattering without ceasing, was now suffocated with sobs, and her elbows upon the window-ledge was weeping silently over this procession. Odette, hidden at another window, wept like her servant, incapable either of tearing herself away from the sight or of controlling her emotion.

At length, having closed the windows, the two women found themselves face to face with wet eyes. Amelia said:

"It is better to be dead than alive."

Never had they experienced such emotions in Paris, where they thought themselves nearer the war because of the number of kilometres between them and the front, or because they heard men deemed well informed telling contradictory news from morning to night. Here in this remote and quiet corner they had now touched the very relics of the hecatomb. The eyes alone tell the truth; words are a small matter.

Amelia could not remain still; she ran to the hospital after the procession. Never in her life had she seen anything so exciting.

On her return she said that she could hardly recognize the entrance of the Grand Hotel, whither she had gone a few months before to carry notes from Monsieur or Madame to M. X or M. Y who were dead now, like Monsieur.

She brought back much information. The wounded who came that morning were from the Department of the North, where a frightful battle had been raging for weeks. "Some of them talk, madame; some of them say nothing; their eyes break your heart, like poor, sick dogs that glance at you as if ashamed and pretend to be asleep." "I could see from where I was," she went on after a little, "the surgeon as he appeared to be, all in white, with a cap like a cook and bare arms; he received them at the door and sorted them out, sending them up-stairs, down-stairs, to the right, the left, pestered by the nurses, who begged for them."

But Odette had not seen them entering the hospital, and this did not interest her. She was pursuing her own thoughts.

"There was one in the procession," she said, "one that was lying down, who was so pale, poor boy! He will not go far."

She had vowed to herself that she would not go out; she would remain with her grief the whole day, the whole week. But immediately after luncheon she put on her hat and went to wander around the hospital.

A hedge separated the street from the great court in which there was still a circular clump of trees surrounded with withered summer flowers; opposite, above another hedge, the vines in a charming flower-garden were reddening on the pergolas. Everything bore the impress of a time of display and enjoyment, and she felt that decorations like these were henceforth antiquated, absurd.

Odette knew already, through Amelia, the disposition of each part of the hospital, whose interior hum she could hear from without. She knew that one flight up, at the first turn, were the typhoids, nursed by a Sister who for twelve years past, wherever she might be sent, had done nothing else than care for typhoids, and go to the nearest church to put up a little prayer. She knew the situation of the staircase leading to the basements, where the food was brought in and the dead carried out. She knew that at a corner of the building looking upon the sea was the operating-theatre, visible from without. And in fact, passing by it, she perceived a group of white-robed men and women, their sleeves turned back, leaning over something or some one. Then she fled toward the sea like a coward and was ashamed. In reality, this assemblage of suffering creatures at once repelled and attracted her, producing a complex sentiment, unfamiliar and incongruous.

From afar she looked at the building and its surroundings. At the sight of this countryside, these villas, these hotels, the memory of the past summer overpowered her, and at the same time she experienced a cruel dispelling of her memories of the past summer. Meanwhile she stood there as if hypnotized by the great house of suffering. On the ground floor, through the glazed verandas she discerned a constant coming and going of white caps. And she thought of the labors which those hundred and fifty new arrivals of the morning must necessitate. She was seized with timidity at the thought of approaching this august place. Before it she seemed to herself a profane person, idle, gloved, parasol in hand, her one interest her personal grief.

An unknown power held her motionless, kept her from going toward the sea, where she had hoped to meet her cruel and too-much loved memories, and yet forbidding her to return to that place of common suffering which she had not made her own. While she stood there, hesitating on the levelled dune, she was shot through with an unaccustomed shiver, which frightened her.

As a pretext for again drawing near the place she told herself that she desired to see once more the poor boy whom she had seen lying so pale on his stretcher. Had they revived him? Sincerely, she would have loved to know. But how set about it? No sooner had she returned to the road that surrounded the glazed verandas than she lost courage to present herself as a curious stranger; men in bed, others sitting up, would stare at the newcomer, young and perhaps pretty under her crape veil.

She returned to her house much more agitated than if she had met any one, and let Amelia talk to her of all that she had learned concerning not only that hospital, but all the hospitals of the region. She remembered of all she heard only the name of a lady whom she had met in August at the Hôtel de Normandie, and who, it appeared, was nursing the wounded in the neighboring hospital, Madame de Calouas.

She shut herself up again, distrustful of the strange attraction that the city of suffering exercised over her. She talked to Jean's photograph, saying to it: "I will be only yours, think of nothing but of you." She read over again the books that they had read together; or rather, she pleased herself by telling herself that she had read these books with Jean. Or she walked in her little garden, making forty turns over the tour of the hedge-bordered alley, strewn with golden flakes which the poplars shed like rain. Sometimes she would pause before the latticed gate upon the road, amusing herself with counting the minutes that one might stand there without seeing a single passer-by. One day she thought she recognized Mme. de Calouas hastening past on a bicycle, light and fleet as a dragon-fly. And she felt a desire to see her again, not on her own account, for she had left upon her only a vague impression, but to talk to her or hear her talk of Jean.

Vainly she watched for her. She even permitted herself to walk out, in the hope of meeting Mme. de Calouas.

"But, madame," said Amelia, "it is very easy. Every one knows when these ladies come back and forth to the hospital. Madame has only to walk up and down before the great court."

It was not till the following Sunday, at eleven o'clock mass, that Odette met Mme. de Calouas and spoke to her.

"What!" exclaimed Mme. de Calouas, "you here! What hospital do you belong to?"

Odette thought that the nurse had made a mistake, intending to say: "Where are you staying?"

"I am at the Elizabeth pavilion."

"Is that the new auxiliary post opened for contagious diseases?"

"It is just a little villa," said Odette simply. "It is large enough for me alone."

"And what are you doing there, good God?"

"I came here," said Odette, "that I might mourn for my husband in peace."

Mme. de Calouas assumed a suitable expression, but made no reply. Odette continued:

"He was killed in the end of September, at the head of his company, going out from the village----"

"Yes, I heard," said Mme. de Calouas. "I ought to have sent you a card; but in times like these----"

"You yourself are in mourning," observed Odette.

"Oh--I! I have lost my husband, my two brothers, my uncle the colonel, several cousins--" She waved her hand with a gesture which signified: "They are past counting!" Before leaving Odette she added:

"Come to see me at the hospital, from eight o'clock to noon, and from two to four. From four to six I have another service at the Red Cross, close by. I will show you things. Come."

For a long time Odette hesitated. Again she shut herself up with her adored memories. She was irritated that Mme. de Calouas had not said a word about that exquisite man who was her Jean, and whom she had met at the hotel. When she went out it was precisely at an hour when she knew Mme. de Calouas to be at her hospitals. When the sea-wind was too strong she would walk in the dull streets of the deserted summer city, a pleasure resort in which the word "pleasure" had become strange and unfitting. The streets crossed at right angles; nearly all of them were bordered by hedges beyond which one could see a garden, the wire cage of a tennis-court, a Norman villa, and no one. Often, the whole length of her walk she met only one human being, a big man, almost impotent, whose duty it was to sweep up the dead leaves--an absurd duty since the wind scattered them as fast as he swept, and the trees shed down behind him another layer of little golden, rolling, dead things.

Sometimes, walking daringly, Odette crossed the long terrace, and braving the wind went as far as to the sea.

At certain hours the beach was covered with men under treatment. You recognized them by the slings that supported their arms, by their crutches, their bandaged heads, not often by their uniforms, of which they preserved only odd parts. They wore old jackets, knitted waistcoats, trousers brought forth from old Norman wardrobes. Some of the men limped, others wearily dragged their feet along the sand; those who had legs wrestled with one another, ran races, played like children. They delighted in the edge of the sea, gathering shells, and regaling themselves with the slimy flesh of cockles. Some of them cast a too expressive glance upon the young woman, with an awkward word which at another time would have made her smile. It was an amazing group of tatterdemalions; within the memory of man no eye had ever looked upon such a sight. It excited compassion; and yet almost every man in particular had gained, without trying, the manly merit of always seeming to be in good humor.

Whenever she saw them Odette felt moved, and at the same time somewhat jealous. _He_ had not been washed, bandaged, ministered to, nor even clothed in rags; _he_ had not been able to drag his mangled limbs along the seashore; _he_ had been killed outright. She would say to herself: "Perhaps one of these soldiers knew him, perhaps he saw him fall; he could tell me the details, could describe his last days, his last hour, his last minute." And she grew faint at the possibility of asking them, of learning.

The low tide, the stormy sky, the wind, the grayish hillsides, the transports on the horizon, always this immense deserted beach, these wretched relics of the war, and she, disconsolate widow, imploring the wind to snatch her away and destroy her in its eddies! The constant reminders of the past, the sight of these same places, natural background of all the pleasant things of life! The thought of that water which had bathed the limbs of Jean, and of the August sun, and the restless multitude, gay and elegant, whom the many-colored sweaters set off like a profusion of tulips; the movement of automobiles, the music of the orchestra! Her heart ached at these contrasts even more than it had done in Paris. The solitude, the approaching winter, and the near contact with suffering aroused in her an unwelcome agitation. The restless air, dark with cawing crows, brought a bitter taste to her lips, and yet aroused in her an indescribable sense of splendor.

VII

Nothing less than the thought of meeting Mme. de Calouas at church on the following Sunday before she had paid her promised visit could have induced Odette to cross the threshold of the hospital.

She went on Saturday, between two and four o'clock. An orderly wearing a corporal's bands detained her as if her hand-bag might conceal incendiary bombs, but was softened on hearing the name of Mme. de Calouas, and led her to room 74. Odette was kept a long time standing at the door of room 74; at last a doctor came out, carrying a case of instruments. He was followed by Mme. de Calouas, who said:

"It is too bad, dear madame! I beg you to excuse me; one of my patients detained me. But now I am at your service; just let me change my blouse before taking you to see the wards."

Her change of costume was soon made, and she took Odette to a neighboring room where a very young nurse and two military orderlies were with great difficulty holding down a patient in an attack of tetanus. The sick man's head with its contracted jaws and inflexible neck reminded her of certain "attractions" of the waxworks; the upheaved body, forming an arc from head to heels, was as rigid and unyielding as the arch of a bridge. Odette turned pale, and Mme. de Calouas said:

"You lack training. See this child who is nursing him! She isn't twenty years old--a mere girl."

They passed into another room, from which exhaled a pestilential odor.

"Gangrene from the gas," said Mme. de Calouas. "It is not a perfume for the pocket-handkerchief, far from it! But one gets accustomed to anything. With assiduous care and absolute asepsis we have saved a certain number of wounded who suffer from this complication. We are so fortunate here as to have a surgeon who is not in haste to use the knife."

In the long corridor nurses, for the most part young, were gliding or running. A priest, wearing his alb, was hastening to one of the rooms. Carried along by his speed, Mme. de Calouas entered after him, and Odette followed her.

It was a comfortable hotel bedroom, hung with brightly colored paper; there were two women in white, and on a clean white bed lay a tall young man, uncovered, almost as white as the bed, from whose lips poured a stream of blood. He had received a fragment of shell in the sinus, had been operated upon that morning, and hemorrhage had set in--a stream white and red, unlike anything she had ever seen; it overwhelmed her with horror.

"You should apply a tampon," said Mme. de Calouas.

"The doctor is coming," replied one of the nurses.

They were both leaning over the white body; one was injecting serum into the stomach, the other was applying a syringe with ipecac to the thigh. The priest was standing at the cadaverous feet, anointing them with the sacred oil. The doctor arrived and applied the proper tampons.

To Mme. de Calouas this was one of the normal cases which one meets on visiting a military hospital. Odette was making every effort to stand upright. She begged to go out in the air. Mme. de Calouas smiled.

"It is war! And we are only in one of the rear hospitals. There is no rain of shells here. Shall we visit the wards down-stairs, if you please?"

The vast wards were almost vacant at this hour, for many of the patients were out-of-doors.

"They recover rapidly, if you only knew! One can see the new flesh grow."

"And they return to the firing-line?" asked Odette.

"They must, indeed!"

A group of four convalescents was playing a game of cards on a bed. Others, stretched at length, were reading; several were sleeping, some were receiving friends. A photographer in a corner was taking pictures.

Beds and beds, and torn flesh, and perforated limbs, and members sawn off, and trepanned skulls! And the tetanus, the gangrene, the typhus, and that red torrent by which the soul of a man was taking flight, amid all that whiteness!

Odette felt as if she should die, and left the hospital. During all her visit one question had been upon her lips: "Shall I find here any one who knew my husband?" What was it that kept her from uttering it? She could not have told how it was, but she had not so much as pronounced her husband's name. A weight had seemed to be crushing her during the whole time. She had felt overwhelmed by the new horror. The worst was that when at last she reached home she felt ashamed to weep for her own sorrow.

The fact also that all that human flesh had been ravaged for the same cause; that of those unhappy ones who were groaning, not one thought of blaming the cause; and that other fact that one part of humanity, upright and able, was bending with help over the other, gasping part, forced her to gather up her disordered thoughts and in the midst of her confusion to exclaim:

"Something is changed!"

That evening, at six o'clock, instead of wandering about the streets in heavy sadness, she went, as Mme. de Calouas had begged her to do, to evening prayer at the Chapel of the Orphanage, in which the Red Cross was now installed. It was a convent chapel, reserved for nuns, the public being admitted only behind a sort of screen of carved wood, through which could be seen the orderly rows of Sisters and orphans, the altar and the lights. She found herself in the midst of valid soldiers; that is to say, such as by one means or another could move from place to place. There were bandaged heads, arms in slings, stiff or deformed legs, crutches. Odette was moved by the singing more than she could have believed. Suddenly sobs choked her, and she wept. The men turned toward this young woman in mourning whom they could hardly have helped noticing, and who kept on wiping her eyes. She was weeping from a natural need of weeping. She was weeping for Jean, but also she wept with great pity for all those lacerated bodies; and for the first time she realized that these men, or these fragments of men, had come from places where death and pain were of all things the most usual.

Mme. de Calouas heard and saw her, and knew that Odette had come here to weep for her husband. As they went out she said to her:

"You loved him much, then?"

And by these words Odette realized that she had been weeping for an immeasurable loss, which had left her in a sense benumbed.

VIII

This did not last long, and as soon as she reached home she made honorable amends to Jean. She drove from her every thought except of him, denouncing the universal conspiracy against her beloved memories. What could she do to mitigate the misfortunes of others, however great and innumerable they might be? Those women who seemed to deny their own griefs filled her with a sort of dismay.

She passed hours of sleeplessness revolving these ideas, determining at whatever cost to master herself, and forget the whole distracted world. She fell asleep vowing henceforth to belong wholly to the memory of Jean.

Yet the next morning, Sunday, coming out of church, she found no rest till she had met Mme. de Calouas and asked her:

"Could I be of use to you at the hospital?"

"I was expecting you," Mme. de Calouas replied. "I would do nothing to bring you before the time; but I am glad that you wish to come. I will begin by taking you under my wing; for your initiation you shall be my helper. Does that suit you?"

"Of course. I do not know how to do anything."

"When will you come?"

"When you please."

"Well, I will leave you your Sunday. Or rather, come with me now, that I may at once get you received by the head doctor, and find a provisional cap and blouse for you. The rest will be for to-morrow morning."

Odette saw the head doctor; she tried on the nurse's costume which her friend would lend to her until she could procure one; and at eight o'clock the next morning, after having signed an engagement, she entered the hospital, almost as if she was entering a convent.

At that hour the hired women were sponging the floors with wet cloths, and through the wards resounded the click of buckets set down, the metal handle falling against their sides. The floors exhaled moisture. The sea air, entering by the open windows, swept out the odor of the sick-room. Convalescent men were going to the lavatories; others were helping comrades with helpless arms to wash themselves upon their cots.

Odette asked for Mme. de Calouas, and found her before the twenty beds allotted to her. A dozen of them were occupied by seriously wounded men, who gazed upon the newcomer with embarrassing steadfastness. Mme. de Calouas led Odette to the room where dressings were done, passing through the whole ward, where sixty men were exchanging the morning greetings of the soldier, now rough, now amusing. She was, above all, surprised that the nurses paid them no attention.

While giving instructions to her pupil Mme. de Calouas was busy disinfecting mugs, unrolling pieces of cotton and tearing them into bits, counting piles of compresses, tubes, drains. The room exhaled an odor of antiseptics, sweet and insipid.

They returned to the ward, and Mme. de Calouas made known to her each patient by name, with certain indications as to his case; she begged Odette to wash this or that one, to make the bed of an unfortunate who, with only one arm, could not do it alone.

"Be careful what you say to them," she whispered in her ear. "Remember that their estimate of you will depend upon your first words."

Odette observed that the patients gazed at her without once turning away their eyes. She won their approval by the first words she uttered, and by the gentleness with which she washed the faces of two or three helpless men, and she saw their expressions change. Those eyes so full of agony, which make unpractised fingers tremble, were softened. Her hands were dexterous, her face attractive. There was one poor fellow whom she had to wash from head to foot, like a new-born baby, a difficult task for a beginner. When all was finished and he was wrapped in clean linen she was about to pass to another bed, when the patient said: "Wait, madame!" And she saw him painfully turn in his bed, raise his sheet, awkwardly stretch out a suffering arm in the attempt at any cost to reach the case that hung at the head of the bed. She held the linen bag within his reach, and he, hesitating, fumbling, blindly feeling among a litter of things, a knife, letters, bits of bread, succeeded in extracting two photographs, those of his wife and his two little children. He desired to reward the new nurse for her kind offices, and he did his best by introducing her to his little family. Deeply touched, Odette praised the wife and the two children, and thenceforward the poor fellow was her friend.

Mme. de Calouas came to say that the stretcher-bearers were coming to carry "the thigh" to be dressed. Odette followed "the thigh." The new nurse was asked to cut the dressing. She broke into a cold perspiration; she thought the scissors were defective, and her remark provoked a smile from all the experts around; only the patient looked at her with an apprehension which seemed to paralyze her.

"You must learn to cut dressings," said Mme. de Calouas. "You will get used to it; just a knack."

Finally the steel succeeded in biting through the damp compresses. When they fell apart the wound appeared. It was an open fracture of the leg, whence exhaled the special sickening smell of osseous pus. The large wound spread open like a nightmare flower with thick petals, soft and viscid, covered with a creamy layer of dull old-rose color. They washed it; the patient gritted his teeth; now and again a cry escaped from the thin little brown face. When they looked at him he was brave enough to smile and say, "That's all right."

Odette was more ill than the wounded man. As on the previous evening, she asked that she might go out into the air, and when she stumbled at the door, turned pale, and was about to faint, the orderly, who understood these phenomena, with the help of a valid patient laid her all along upon a marble slab. It was only for a moment, and she returned to the room, saying, like the wounded man: "That's all right." The uninterrupted process of dressing made even her forget the incident. A kindly woman drew her into an embrasure and gave her a drop of cordial.

At that moment a man was being carried to the operating-room. He blustered a little as he addressed to his comrades the classic _au revoir_ which may so well be an _adieu_: "I am going to my game of billiards!"

"Try to win, old fellow," they answered from all parts of the ward.

And, without flinching, Odette was present at "her" first operation.

She returned home at half past twelve, exhausted, but lighter in heart and satisfied with herself.

"Madame is pale," said Amelia. "Madame is the color of the lamp-shade when the lamp is lighted."

After luncheon she slept heavily for half an hour, and returned to the hospital. The afternoon was more calm, at least until the second visit of the head physician, before the men's six-o'clock meal. She made further acquaintance with her patients; she heard them talk about the war. She found occasion to say, "My poor husband was killed on the 22d of September," but it produced no great effect, none of those soldiers having known Lieutenant Jacquelin. Each told about what he had seen, and nothing else seemed to him to have a real existence. She was disappointed, but by their various touching stories of what they had been through, she was introduced to that war of which she had determined to know nothing since her husband was dead. The battles of the Yser, the sufferings of the combatants who had passed day after day in freezing water, the grotesque onslaughts of the Germans, the piles of dead under the ominous skies, set her imagination to work. Always thinking of her husband, she saw him all alone in the face of those infuriated enemies, trampled down by them.... He had gone out with drawn sabre from his little village, at the head of his company, and he had been killed outright. Before the survivors of the Yser she no longer dared speak of the circumstance of the lieutenant's death, beautiful though it was. This war seemed to be enlarging, growing beyond measure great.

They were beginning to organize the hospital for the winter; certain persons insisted that the war would not be over in six months; others said with conviction: "Nor in eighteen months either!" But these were suspected of sowing demoralization. Yet the English were making preparations for three years! From her friend La Villaumer, who was still in Paris, Odette received letters in which he wrote:

"We are like children, sometimes gay, laughing and gamboling, at others howling, no one knows why. My dear friend, busy yourself with your work, and don't read the papers. As for me, there is something which impresses me more than the monstrous movements of the German colossus: it is the soul of the colossus. It is _one_; it has only one purpose, which is the greatness of the German nation. It is a rudimentary sentiment, savage, primitive, barbarous, but how strong! We ourselves are fighting because we have been attacked, and also to defend ideas which do us the greatest honor: liberty, justice, and the like. We are animated by a very lively sentiment of the rights of man. We love humanity; they, the Germans, love Germany. How much more simple it is, and how it relieves them of all the scruples that hold us back! And yet, in the final issue, it is he who shall have triumphed by force who will lay down the moral values of the future."

Thus, uncertainty, admiration, confidence, scepticism, and a state of alarm were concurrently implanted in minds, and Odette, affected by them, like every one else, began from that day to be infected, as with the odor of the hospital, with this irritating compound.

Little by little it seemed to her that she no longer upheld herself, but that she let herself be carried away, borne along and guided by the life of the hospital. It was at once horrible and almost laughable. A place of pain, the perpetual reminder of enormities which the human brain could never have conceived, it was also an assemblage dominated by youth, which saves all. In the gaze of those prostrate wounded, gaze which had become of so much importance to her who passed and repassed along the bedsides, burned a flame disturbing and alluring, result of the burning away of something that could not be named. At times, one felt as if in certain of those wounded men one saw beings returned from the beyond. They had seen what nothing had prepared them to see, something that confused them, both their senses and their judgment. Some of them said: "It was hell!" Others, much more simple-minded, merely said: "One must have been there!" Certain of them, without imagination or memory, living entirely in the present moment, shut up within themselves an unconscious gravity which was in strange contrast with their youthful natures. But in a general way a new nurse like Odette could aver:

"But the wounded are not sad!"

"Because," some one would reply, "they are all happy at not being dead."

Thus, day succeeded day, without softening Odette's personal sorrow, but as if shrouding it behind a mourning veil which covered all that she could imagine of earth's surface. Everything made her think of Jean, but she had not time to appear to be thinking of him, and she shrank from speaking of him.

She led a very active life. It would happen that just as she sat down at table, all alone in the evening in the Elizabeth pavilion, the door-bell would ring. It would be one of the volunteer employees, passing along on his bicycle to notify the nurses that a train of one hundred and twenty wounded men was announced to reach the station at eleven o'clock. By half past ten Odette, who would not take a nap, and who knew not what to do at home, was already at the hospital, in her cap and blouse. The more zealous ones were there, and the more indolent ones as well, welcoming the opportunity to get together and gossip. The head physician was coming and going, opening and shutting doors; the doctors were arriving one by one; the surgeon, all in white, his sleeves turned back to the elbows, was talking with the women. The telephone-bell rang; it was the police commissioner sending word that the train was an hour late. A few persons were in despair; there were some whom the matter moved to laughter. Every one waited. And sometimes the train, instead of one hour, was two or three hours late. Resignation became general in proportion as reasons for impatience accumulated. In the great hall where they were all assembled some seated themselves on anything they could find, others lay down upon stretchers. Bright conversation grew dim with the lights. White-robed women, going up or down stairs on tiptoe, seemed like angelic apparitions. Through the partitions came the heavy breathing of sleeping men. Suddenly the ringing of a bell startled every one; the train was drawing into the station at last. The lights were turned up. Ten minutes later the first automobiles were sounding in the court. The double-leaved doors were thrown wide, notwithstanding the cold, the stretcher-bearers rushed out, and in a moment, contrasting with their rapid bounds, came slowly the wounded soldiers, bleeding, bearded, covered with earth, wan, exhausted; some of them half-naked, some with frozen feet, upheld or carried by sturdy fifteen-year-old lads. All were silent, a religious respect hushed the words upon the lips. This torn flesh, these rags of French uniform, wrought in the mind of every being not utterly insensible a change in his idea of the pathetic; something of the atmosphere of the firing-line entered and asepticized every heart.

The next morning the sense of familiarity returned. But in that one hour of the dark winter night, while the surgeon, bending over each victim, was asking him almost tenderly: "And you, my child?"--something august, an exhalation of the colossal human sacrifice, penetrated into this commonplace old hotel hall, sanctifying it for all time to come. And not one of those men or women who had been there, however advanced the hour of the night, however visible the fatigue on all their faces, but was glad for having been there.

Whence came these wounded men? From Ypres, from Arras, from Notre-Dame de Lorette. The names called up all that any one knew, through newspapers and private talk, of those charnel-houses whose image the imagination refuses to harbor, upon which those who have escaped from them keep silence.

Odette, soapy brush in hand, forcing back all repugnance, doing as others did, was helping to soothe agonies which humanity seems never before to have known or dreamed of. The most shocking duties no longer repelled her. The very effort which she was compelled to make, by the contrast between what she was seeing and doing and what life had formerly offered her, pressed the character of the catastrophe to her mind which lacked capacity to conceive of it. "Is it, then, so great?" she would wonder. And even: "Is there after all anything great?" For no soul in the world had taught her this. The inevitable contrast with her past life, all for herself, for her individual satisfaction, seemed to dishonor her memories, even of happiness, making them almost trivial. This, indeed, was the opinion of Mme. de Calouas, but not that of Amelia, whom in her solitude it became sometimes necessary to oppose.

"Madame adopts the ideas of those around her," the maid would say; "it is all very well, but Madame may believe me: the good time, and the true time, was before all this, when the poor men were not preparing to be made into hash."

IX