"_Journal of Small Things_"
_Told by Helen Mackay, an American Author_
This is a story of little things and impressions gathered on the
battle grounds by a woman of sensitive vision and understanding.
She relates her impressions with a delicate pathos, little
incidents half observed, half forgotten, which clustered around
the big tragedy. Mrs. Mackay has gathered several hundred of
these little stories into a book. A few of them, typical of their
literature and woman quality are here related by permission of her
publishers, _Duffield and Company_: copyright 1917.
[7] I--THE STORY OF THE DEPOT D'ECLOPES
The dépot d'éclopés is just beyond the town, on the Roman road. The
building was once the Convent of the Poor Claires. When the Sisters
were sent away it was used as Communal Schools. There is a great plane
tree outside the door in the yellow wall, and a bench in the shade.
There is room for seven éclopés to sit crowded together on the bench.
They bring out some chairs also.
All day long, and every day, as many of the éclopés as can get about,
and do not mind that the road see them, and can find space in the shade
of the plane tree, sit there, and look up and down the sunshine and the
dust.
Some of them have one leg, and some of them have one arm. There is one
of them who is packed into a short box on wheels. He sits up straight
in the box, and he can run it about with his hands on the wheels. There
is another in such a little cart, but that one has to lie on his back,
and cannot manage the wheels himself. There is one who lies on a long
stretcher, that they fix on two hurdles. There are two who are blind.
The two blind men sit, and stare and stare....
I often go and stay with the éclopés at the gate, they like to have
anybody come. It was a long time before I dared go in at the gate.
Inside the gate there is a courtyard that was once the nuns' garden,
with their well in the middle of it and their fruit trees trained along
the walls. And there, there move about all day, or keep to the shadow,
of first the east wall, then the west, those of the éclopés whom the
road must not see.
Some of them look up at you when you come in. But most of them turn
away from you.
The two blind men at the gate who stare and stare, they cannot see the
golden town or the golden mountains. They cannot see the compassion and
the kindness that there is for them in the faces of all those who look
upon them.
But these men in the courtyard, however will they learn to bear, down
all their lives, the looks that there will be for them in the most
kind, compassionate faces?
There are not ever enough chairs under the plane tree. There are more
éclopés than there are chairs. How they laugh! They think it very droll
to see a man who has only his left leg and a man who has only his right
leg sharing a chair.
The men who have no legs say that that is not nearly so bad as having
no arms. They say that the men with no arms are ashamed to be seen,
like the men wounded in the face. They say that the men with no arms
will never come out even to the gate.
They never will let you stand. It is a dreadful thing to do, to take
one of their chairs. But they like to talk to a stranger.
All of them, except the man whose spine has been hurt, love to talk.
The man whose spine has been hurt lies all day, the days he can be
brought out, on a stretcher, never stirring. He never speaks except to
say one thing. He is very young. He looks as if he were made of wax.