Paris
Monday, October 11th
I was thinking all night in the train--how can I look at them, how can
I speak to them in their depth of grief? I was thinking--when the old
woman comes to open the door, what can I say to her? When the old man
comes to take my big dressing-case and my little dressing-case, and my
strap of books, how can I face him? Their son is dead.
The son of our concierge is dead. "Mort au Champ d'Honneur."
They were so proud of him. They did so worship him. He was such a
clever boy that he had gone beyond anything they had ever imagined. If
you just in passing saw him with them, you thought he did not belong to
them at all. You thought he was a gentleman who was waiting a minute
for some reason, there in the loge. But you would have known, if you
had had time for it, how he worshipped them and was proud of them; they
had worked so hard, his little fat slow sweet mother in the neat black
dress, and his little stumpy cross father, who made it a point to come
to the door in his shirt sleeves.
In those wonderful first days the son of our concierge went away.
It was on Tuesday, the second day, in the afternoon, about five
o'clock. He had to be at the Gare d'Austerlitz at seven, and getting
there was difficult.
I think that day was the most cruel and most wonderful of all. I shall
always remember how hot it was, and how the leaves were fallen in the
garden.
They told me how it seemed as if he really could not go. He kept
starting, and coming back; and starting, and coming back. He hugged his
little fat old mother, in her neat black dress; and hugged her, and had
to turn back to hug her again. His father was going with him, to help
carry the bundles. He was in his shirt sleeves. He kept blowing and
blowing his nose. His mother had said she would not come to the door.
But she did come to the door. She had said she would not stand to watch
him go. But she did, crying and smiling and waving to him. He got to
the street corner four different times. And three of the times he came
back, to hug her just once again.
And he is killed.
There will be the little stumpy father in his shirt sleeves, and the
little, so very respectable mother, fat and slow.
How can I look at them? What can I say to them?
They must open the door for us, and pay the taxi, and carry up our
things.
How can I tell them that I kneel before their sorrow as if it were a
throne?
Same day, 11th of October
The first thing to do was to go up to my neighbour's queer big
kitchen--up on the roofs--because there were eleven little soldiers at
supper, to whom, though I have not been here to see them until now, I
must say good-bye. It is the last day of their leave, they will be off
to-morrow.
Always my permissionnaires eat with my neighbour's permissionnaires
together in the kitchen on the roof. They are always men from the
invaded countries, who have nowhere to go for their leave.
Before, they have always been men who had been in hospitals and were
sent to us for their sick-leave; but these are little young boys, the
Classe Seize, just from their dépôts, with a few days of leave before
their beginning of battle. The oldest of them is nineteen.
You go up to the kitchen by a little twisted stairway, like the
stairway of a tower. On three sides of the kitchen there are charming
blue mansarde roofs and black crooked chimney-pots, and on the fourth
side there are the treetops of an old garden. When the leaves are
fallen, one can look down from the kitchen terrace, through the
branches of the trees, and see all the design of the garden, paths and
lawns, statues and massifs and the big central basin, as in the ground
plan, drawn so long ago.
To-night the fallen leaves in the sunset made the garden a place all
of amber. One looked down into an amber glow. And all the roofs and
treetops of the quarter, and the two tall towers of Sainte Clotilde,
seemed translucent; for the gold of the sunset to shine through.
The kitchen has a floor of polished red brick tiles and shines with
beautiful copper pots.
Eleven little soldiers were just finishing their coffee at the table
with the red cloth.
What babies they are. And how alike they look, all of them. It is
absurd. Eleven round close-cropped heads; eleven round rosy peasant
faces; eleven pairs of round clear eager questioning eyes; eleven
straight young figures, with stiff gestures, in bleu d'horizon.
Classe Seize, eighteen years, nineteen years, twenty years. It has
become the age to die.
Tuesday, October 12th
The Chocolates
I went to get some chocolates at a little shop near the hospital.
The woman of the shop counted me out the heap of chocolates one by one
in their silver paper.
She was a thin pale little woman with the sort of blue eyes that are
always sad. Her eyes looked as if they had cried and cried, in her
worn faded little face. She had the little woollen cape of the quarter
around her shoulders and her pale hair was rather grey.
While she was counting the chocolates the postman came. He brought a
big square yellow envelope addressed in that special writing, surely,
of a little soldier, and with the franchise militaire.
I thought--It is a letter from her son.
She took it, thanking the postman, and put it down on the table and
went on counting out the chocolates.
"But, Madame," I said, "are you not going to read your letter?"
She turned and I saw that she was crying.
"It is from my son," she said.
She began putting the chocolates in handfuls into a paper bag.
She said, "This morning I had a notice from the Mairie that he is
killed."
The Goldfish and the Watch
On a table in the window there was an opal-blue bowl full of water,
with purple iris floating in it, and little bright goldfish, four of
them, glinting through it.
Some one had given it that day to the children.
René, the eldest boy, stood by the table watching the goldfish, not
thinking of his father at all.
There were minutes in the days when he did not think of his father.
But afterwards it was always the same thing.
He never told any one, because he was seven years old and very shy. No
one would have understood. And it was dreadful to him when people did
not understand.
It was about his father's watch.
On one thick, hot, velvet-black night, his father had come into his
room and waked him with a sudden switching on of the light, and said,
"Hop up, old chap, you've got to go and tell your mother to stop
crying."
"But, father, why? Will she not stop when you tell her?"
"It is because of me that she cries. I have got to go away."
"Oh, father, why have you got to go away?"
"Because there is war, René. I have got to go and fight. And you have
got to stay and look after your mother. Quick now; go to her and say,
'I'm here.'"
"But, father----"
"Here's my watch for you, old chap, and the chain, you see. Mind you
take care of it. Don't let it run down. I want to find it right to
the minute when I come back. And I want to find your mother well, not
crying--and you, my brave little man, taking care of everything for me."
"Like the watch, father?"
"Yes, like the watch."
So he had to take simply terrible care of his father's watch.
If it ran down, if he let it run down, what in the world would not
happen?
The battles might be lost to France. His mother might die. And then
whatever could he say to his father?
In the days he used to hurry home from everything, to the watch. And
in the nights he used to sit up in bed to listen for its ticking. He
would stay awake for hours in the nights, afraid it might stop and he
not know. Often in the nights he would cry from the tiredness of having
to keep awake and listen. But in the days he would forget the watch,
sometimes, for a little.
To-day he was happy because of the goldfish.
Hospital, Friday, October 15th
Just these days the people of several of the men have been coming from
far to see them.
Way off, in some little town of Brittany or the Béarn, or Provence,
there had arrived word that the soldier this or that had been wounded
thus or so, and was at the hospital. Upon months and months of waiting
in dreadful, helpless ignorance, the shock had come as a relief almost.
But how strange and terrible a thing the journey was to people who
could understand so little what they must do. Where to go, what to
do. Perhaps they were people who had never ventured beyond the town
where the diligence stopped, who never had taken a train. They did not
know what the Champagne meant. They did not know where Paris was. The
departure was a tremendous thing. A tearing up of roots and cutting
with a knife. Then the journey, confused and terrifying. Then the great
city, and the great hospital.
There is a moment when it seems as if it were a stranger, the boy lying
there, in the bed that is one of such a long row of beds. His people
stand, a little dazed, down by the door. The long ward, the two long
rows of beds against its walls, the stretcher-beds down the middle
of it; and all those boys who lie so still--how strange it seems to
them! And their boy, who does not wave his hand or shout to them, who
scarcely lifts his head--his smile has changed, has come to be quite a
different smile.
Hospital, Sunday, October 17th
Number 24
Number twenty-four is dying. I am very glad. It is much better for him
that he should die. But it takes so long. It is terrible that it should
take so long to die.
He calls me, "Ma petite dame."
"My little lady, what time is it?"
Strange, how they ask that, so many of them, when they are dying.
There is a clock on the wall opposite his bed. They tell me that for
three weeks he has not been able to see it. He says the room is full of
mist.
He says, "My little lady, can you see the clock?"
I always answer, "No, I cannot see the clock."
He says, "You cannot see it because of the mist."
And I say, "I cannot see it, because of the mist."
La Mort d'un Civil
The old Monsieur is dying. He has been dying for days and days and
days. He is dying at a time when death is very cheap. Every one is
dying. The youth of the whole world is being taken away. What does it
matter at all that an old man, who has no part in the war, is taken
away? Who, except his elderly maiden daughter, has time to care?
Cousine Gertrude is very kind. She comes every evening, after the
hospital, and stays for two hours, sitting in the room, knitting grey
socks, while his daughter rests a little.
Her boy François, aged twenty-one, went out on the first day. He has
been all the time in the trenches, except for one leave of six days. He
is in the trenches now, in Champagne.
The man dying here has everything that is possible done for him. He has
the best that can be had of doctors and nurses.
These boys in the trenches one dares not think of how it may be with
them.
His daughter is very brave. She never cries. She remembers that Cousine
Gertrude would like a cup of tea.
She knows that the son of Cousine Gertrude is young and beautiful.
Death, in these days, is young and beautiful.
And her father is old. His death is only a dreary thing.
She understands that even people as good as Cousine Gertrude must
grudge it its place in the world.
Canal
In all the mornings and nights, going to the hospital and coming back
from it, I love my canals. The canals of Venice, of Holland, rivers and
great waterfalls and fountains and the waterways of kings' gardens,
that people travel far to find beautiful, are beautiful for all the
world. But my canal is beautiful for just me.
Its narrow stone-bound curve is hung over by uncared-for plane-trees,
and by ragged, jagged, rickety, crooked houses, that lilt and tilt
and lean together and over, dingy and dark. The rough cobbled quays
have small traffic now, the litter of the canal's old life is gone
from them. They are quiet, with no more rough calling and shouting of
carters, and turmoil of hoofs and wheels. Sometimes, but rarely, a slow
heavy flat canal boat is towed and poled along, through the locks and
under the high black bridges. But most times the slow tawny water flows
unbroken.
The tawny leaves of the plane-trees are fallen, and lie on the cobbles
and in the water. The stems and branches of the plane-trees have black
reflections in the water, with the reflections of crazy roofs and
chimney-pots, and of tatters and rags of colour from windows and walls.
Sometimes in the mornings, these October mornings of sardius and topaz
and sapphire, I find myself singing as I walk along the edge of my
canal. It is so difficult not to be happy.
Hospital
My hospital was, all of it, built in the time that means lovely things
of red-brick and grey stone and blue gables. The courtyards are paved
with huge ancient cobbles, and there are grass plots that are green and
wet, and big trees and bushes whose leaves are falling slowly in blue
stillness.
There are more than two thousand sick in my hospital, six hundred
wounded of the war, one hundred and fifty of them in our service.
I love to write "my" hospital and "our" service.
Madame Marthe
Hospital, Tuesday, October 19th
Things had been very bad all day. When night came it seemed dreadful
to go away and leave so much suffering. I thought of the night, with
fever and that special helplessness which belongs to the night.
I would have been so glad to stay the night out with the ward.
I said that to Madame Marthe, as we left together.
She said, "But why?"
She always has a cold and wears a little blue woollen cape over her
blouse and apron. When she leaves the hospital she pins up the two
black ribbon streamers of her cap of the tri-couleurs and wraps her
arms around in the blue woollen cape. She looks very small and cold and
poor.
"Why?" she asked.
The hospital is her world and she is thankful for every minute she can
get away from it.
I leave my world to come to it.
I was ashamed to say to her, "It is for my own comfort I want to stay,
to make myself imagine that I really am needed."
Hospital
Things They Say
Perhaps in other, different kinds of hospitals, hospitals of the little
good sisters, or of ladies of the Red Cross, hospitals of beautiful
influences, one could not love the men so much. In hospitals where the
beautiful things of the Faith, prayers and tenderness and peace, are
all around about the pain and death; and there are words for praise of
courage and sacrifice, and words for sympathy and for hope, and words
for high ideals; where it is as poets and painters and all people have
always imagined it, perhaps one could not get quite this understanding
of things that are not said, or come in so rough and vivid a way, upon
unimagined things.
One loves to think of the wounded soldier with the nun beside him, and
of the lady of the great world tending the peasant hero. One loves to
hear of the men saying, "C'est pour la France."
Here there are no pictures I would dare call beautiful. It is crude and
raw. And things are not said. When there is not too much suffering, it
is rough. And when the suffering is great, it is all very dumb.
Here there is no one who knows how to word things. The men do not know,
and the nurses do not know how to tell them. They all only just go on.
The nurses are poor women, of the people. They come, each one of them,
from her own small desperate struggle for life, each from her own
crushing deadening small miseries and cares, without any help of dream
and vision, callously--one, just looking on, might think--to their
work in the hospital. To the great magnificent suffering, each one of
them comes dulled and hardened by some small sordid helpless suffering
of her own. Everything has always been a struggle, and this is just
part of it. They work on every day, and all day long, with no one to
put into words for them, devotion and sacrifice. No one here speaks of
those things, or thinks of them, or even knows.
When I see my little Madame Marthe, my chief, so very tired, I say
to her, "You work so hard." And she always says, shrugging her thin
round shoulders, "Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, i' faut b'en. Nous sommes
là pour ça." If I dared to tell the patronne, who is intelligent to
bitterness, that I admired this she did or that, she would say, "What
of it, we are paid for that."
Odd how often it is the same thing that people say.
When I ask of a man with the Croix de Guerre what he did to win it, he
always says, "Je n'ai fait que comme les autres."
A man going back does not say to us here that he is glad to have his
life to offer again for his country. But he says that thing which
makes me catch my breath with pride in him. "Je veux b'en. Tous les
copains sont là."
They go off like that, to those places of death that they know already,
wherein they have seen things we dare not imagine, and all they say
about it is that all the copains are there.
There are not many of my ward who go back, ours are the very badly
wounded, the men who are out of it.
The men have done all that they could do. Every one of them did all
that he could do, and kept on doing it as long as he could. And when he
could do no more, why then he was out of it, and it was for others to
take up and go on with. He himself was done with it. He would rather
not talk about it. It had been so bad that he does not want to talk
about it. He does not want to think about it any more.
He would rather talk about things that used to happen "dans le pays,"
about the vines or the corn, or the fishing boat with oars or with
sails, and "la vieille" and "les petiots."
"It is pretty bad?" I say, perhaps, to this one or that one, when I see
how he is suffering.
I have never heard one of them say, "C'est pour la France."
But what they always, always say, all of them, is a thing I think very
beautiful.
"You suffer much, my child?"
"Pas trop, Madame."
Always it is, "Not too much."
But sometimes it is too much, and they cannot bear it.
And when I look at the bed that used to be his, I think of him lying
there trying to smile and to say that his suffering was not too much.
And the new man in the bed says those same words, as if it were a
little formula always an answer to the question I cannot help asking.
"You suffer much?"
"Not too much, Madame."
Sometimes they say, "Ca va aller mieux."
"Ca ne va pas, mon petit?"
"Ca va aller mieux."
There is only one thing that is like the things one reads of. It is
that the men, when they are very, very bad, always, always call for
their mothers.
I remember reading that somewhere, and thinking it was just something
somebody had thought pretty to write.
But it is one of the most true and simple and beautiful things that
there can be in the world.
It is strange too. When they suffer desperately, they keep saying, "My
mother, my poor mother," as if it were she who suffered. They seem to
be grieving for her, not for themselves.
When they are frightened they call for her. Some of them are frightened
of taking chloroform. They have fought and not been afraid, they would
not be afraid to die, but chloroform is different.
Joseph opens the double doors of the ward and pushes the stretcher cart
in and calls the number this or that.
He is all ready and waiting.
Joseph lifts him from the bed to the cart. I double a pillow under his
head and wrap the blanket over, and follow.
The doors at the other side of the hall are closed, and I run ahead to
open them, and shut them behind again after the cart.
If I can make an excuse I go down the corridor and wait also at the
door of the operating room. I know the men hate to wait there alone.
Sometimes there is very long to wait. And Joseph has to go to do other
things.
Sometimes the door of the operating room is ajar, and one can see in a
little, and that is horrible. People go in and out, the doctors, and
Madame Laure, fetching and carrying things. The stretcher of the man
who has been taken in is left pulled back against the wall, by that of
the man who is waiting his turn. I stand very close to my cart and pat
the blankets.
The men like to have one wait with them. There is a thing many of them
say. It is a dull thing, and touching, as sometimes dull things are.
They will say, over and over, "If you were not here, I should be alone.
If you were not here, I should be alone."
But when the doctors come, with the chloroform, it is only of his
mother the man thinks. He says, "Oh, maman! Oh, maman!" and keeps all
the time saying it till he sleeps.
The adjutant, the new Number 12, says that you can hear them calling
maman all the time when they lie wounded between the trenches, wounded
and one cannot get to them to pick them up. He says it is the last word
they call before they are still.
The Patronne
I take off my cloak and blue veil in the patronne's room.
The patronne is usually sitting at her desk. Sometimes she says good
morning to me, and sometimes she doesn't.
She used to be fille de salle in this hospital, she used to clean
these stairs and corridors; then she rose to be infirmière in the ward
where I work now, and then panseuse. She is a huge gaunt raw-boned
sorrel-coloured woman, who looks like a war-horse. She is so alive
and quick that you feel her personality stronger than anything in the
hospital, than anything, you think, anywhere. I have seen her seem
stronger than death--driving death away.
When Number 17 was so very ill, I think it was she who drove death
away from his bed. She worked and swore, and worked and swore. It was
hideous. I laugh when I remember. Afterwards I found her outside in the
corridor, sitting on the bench. He was going to get well. I cried; and
she swore at me till I laughed.
Big red blotches come out on her arms when she is excited, and get
purple when she is tired. If you visit the hospital, you do not know
what to think of her. But if you work there you admire her, and are
proud when she speaks to you kindly. It is an illumined day if by
chance she says to you, "Bon jour, ma crotte."
Madame Marthe Again
I don't know at all how it happens that a little white mouse of a woman
of the people, who has worked and worked all her life, and never been
cared for by anybody, should have beautiful hands. But Madame Marthe
has beautiful hands. Her hands are small and quick and absolutely
sure. They tremble when things are bad, but in spite of that they are
certain and sure. They never make a mistake. And they are not afraid of
anything.
Sometimes my hands are afraid to touch things, and then I am ashamed.
Sometimes I pretend not to see things that are fallen on the floor, and
when she picks them up, I am so ashamed.
If my two hands were poisoned so that they had to be cut off, it
would not make any difference. But what would the ward do if anything
happened to the hands of Madame Marthe?
The Ward--All Souls' Day
There are twenty-eight beds against the walls of the ward and ten
stretcher-beds down the middle of its long clear bright length. Between
the beds there is no room to push the dressing cart about, it stands
close up against the apparatus of dressings.
There are some things that make stains on the whiteness of the ward.
When I am away from it, I see those things standing out against the
whiteness.
There is the blue of the sublimé in the glass tank of the dressing
cart, and there is the green of the liqueur de Labaraque in the big jar
on the apparatus.
Sometimes there will be the light blue of a képi or the dark blue of a
béret against the wall, hung on the knob at the top of a bed, or the
red of a Zouave's cap.
There are the black squares of the slates over the beds. I can see, as
if from any distance, the words scrawled in chalk on the slates: "Amp.
de la cuisse gauche et de la jambe droite au dessous du genou." "Amp.
du bras droit à l'épaule," and three "Xs" for the hemorrhages. "Plaie
pénétrante poumon gauche, Op. 20 IX." "Brûlures gaz enflammé visage
poitrine deux bras." "Eclat d'obus dans le ventre." "11 éclats d'obus
côté gauche." And on and on like that, up one side of the ward and down
the other.
Besides the black slates there are the placards, pale yellow, printed
and written over that something may be known about the man on the bed.
And there are the pale yellow temperature charts, with the dreadful
lines of fever that zigzag up and down.
There is exactly room between the beds for the night-tables; the chairs
have been put all out into the corridors and heaped up against the wall
opposite the lift. Madame Bayle is annoyed because they are in the way
when the linen comes up. They are to be sent to the attics as soon as
any one has time to see to it. But now no one has time.
Hospital, Thursday, November 11th
The sparrows were all talking together in the trees of the great
central court of the hospital.
I met Madame Bayle as usual in the first court. We almost always meet
there, as I arrive and she is crossing to the store-house on the other
side of the entrance. Usually we stop and stand a minute, listening to
the conversation of the sparrows.
Madame Bayle is the chief of the linen-room of our pavilion. She is
a dreadful fat shining shuffling person, who hates me because I wear
white shoes. Also because once I made her unlock the linen-room for me
to take out some things I thought were mine, and the things were not
mine, and she was angry with me. She is always trying to get me into
trouble to pay me back. But we both love the birds in the courtyard.
When we meet in the courts these days we say to one another, "Voilà nos
pauvres petits pierrots!" and are friends for a moment.
This morning I ran past. I was afraid if I stopped she might give me
news of my ward.
The buildings of the second court have not been militarised. It is the
pavilion of the defective children. None of the children were out in
the court this morning. The lights in their rooms were still burning,
it was so dark a morning; I could see some of the children making up
the rows of little cots, and some of them clearing away the bowls and
pitchers from the long table. There are some who always sit with their
hands in their laps and their heads hanging. They have dreadful little
faces. Some of the children can do lessons a little, and some of them
seem quite bright, and play always the same game, hands around in a
ring, in a corner of the refectory.
The third court is for the wounded of our service. The recreation-room
and various offices and kitchens open on to it, and the windows of the
two storeys of wards look over it.
The lift was down, and Cordier called to me; but I ran past, and up the
two flights of stairs, away from him as from Madame Bayle.
Cordier had been given charge of the lift. He is one of the wounded in
the face. It is not his eyes. It is the lower part of his face. They
are beginning to take off some of the bandages. He did not mind so much
while the bandages quite hid it. But now he minds dreadfully. This
morning I hated dreadfully the sounds he made calling to me. They say
he will never be able to speak distinctly again. I was afraid he would
be hurt because I ran by. But I would have known from his eyes if what
I had dreaded had happened in my ward.
I took off my things in the patronne's bureau, and went across the
passage to the door of the ward where I help every day with the
surgical dressings.
It is always strange to open the door of the ward when one first comes
on. So much may have happened in the night.
I stood outside the door. The door has glass panes that are washed over
with white paint so one cannot see through. There are places where the
paint has not held at the edges, and one can stoop and look in.
I could not see the bed of Number 29 from there, but I would know
from the look of the men in the ward.
As I stooped, the patronne came out from the chief's bureau.
I heard her step and turned.
She said, "He is very bad. If they amputate he will probably die of the
shock. It will have to be the left leg too, at the thigh. It is you who
must tell him. If they do not do it he will die of poisoning certainly."
She stamped her foot at me and said, "Now don't look like that. You've
got to tell him. He will take it better from you." The blotches of her
arms were very purple. She said, "They are going to do it this morning.
Go and tell him." Then she went back into the chief's bureau.
I went into the ward. I still could not see the Number 29 because of
the hoop, like a little tent, that keeps the weight of the blankets
from his legs.
Madame Marthe, the panseuse, was not in the ward. The infirmière,
Madame Alice, was cleaning the night-tables down by the other door.
Every one called, "Bonjour, Madame; bonjour, Madame!"
"Bonjour, les embusqués!"
That is our great joke, that they are all embusqués.
I went across to Number 29 and looked at him over the hoop.
He was lying with his eyes wide open. They are like the eyes of deer
and oxen. He is a very big man, very ugly, with an old scar over half
of his face. Such an ugly, funny face; the shadow of death has no right
to be upon such a ridiculous face. His face was made for making people
laugh. He always kept the whole ward laughing. He used to make me laugh
in the midst of his horrible pansements. No matter what he suffered, he
never used to make a sound. I almost cannot bear it when they suffer
silently. If they scream, I really don't care much. He used to try to
wink at me to make me laugh.
I knew this about him, that his people are woodcutters in the mountains
between the valleys of the Maurienne and the Tarentaise. I do not know
why he went away to strange new countries. He must be thirty-five
years old. In wildernesses he heard of the war three months after it
began. He was wounded seven months ago, and was sent from hospital to
hospital, getting always worse. He is not the sort of creature to be in
a hospital. He looks absurd in a bed. He used to tell me of throwing
one's blanket over a heap of pine boughs and sweet fern. He had much
fever, and he would tell me about the clear, cool, perfect water of a
certain forest spring.
I thought, standing there, how he would be wanting to drag himself into
some hole of rocks and great tree-trunks, where no one saw.
The clock was striking eight. They would not begin to operate before
ten. He would have to think of it for two hours, lying there. He looked
at me very steadily. I thought, "It is I who must tell him, it is I who
must tell him." He tried to wink at me, and then he shut his eyes. I
thought, "I will wait a little."
I went to the apparatus in the middle of the ward and began to get
things ready for the panseuse.
I tried to talk to the men in the beds near, the 9, Barbet, whose fever
had gone down nicely; and 10, the pepère, who has had his right hand
amputated; and 6 and 7 opposite, who are both young and gay and getting
well fast. But I could not talk.
He is only one of thousands and thousands. In the hospitals, in the
dreadful fields, along the roads, they are dying.
Those of the men who could sit up and use their hands were folding
compresses.
Twenty-one started a song and some of the others took it up. They sing
softly, many of them have very nice voices.
Père Mathurin
N'a pas de chaussons!
Il en aura;
Il n'en aura pas.
Roulons-le, Père Mathurin,
Roulons-le
Jusqu'à demain!
I got everything ready on the dressing-table. I kept all the time
looking at the clock. Every few minutes I passed where I could see
Number 29. He lay always with his eyes shut. Madame Alice had finished
her cleaning and had gone to tidy up. Madame Marthe would come back and
we would have to begin the dressings.
Dans une brouette
Père Mathurin
Roulons-le
Jusqu'à demain.
When I was unrolling the big cotton, I felt sure, suddenly, that 29 was
waiting for me. It was odd, for I could not see him round the hoop; I
went to him.
His eyes were open and he tried to say something. His mouth was black
with fever.
I leaned down close.
I was thinking, "I've got to tell him."
But he said, "Don't worry, I know."
I stood there and I did not say anything. I did not even look at him.
I looked quite away out of the windows to the treetops and the blue
roofs and the wet close sky.
He lay perfectly still, and I just stood there.
The men went on singing--
Père Mathurin,
Il en aura,
Il n'en aura pas----
Madame Marthe had come in and was going about her work. She did not
call me. It was nice of her not to call me.
She is quick and very clever and nervous and bad-tempered. She is
rather horrid for me usually, but to-day she has been so nice that I
shall always remember.
She went on with the dressings. I stood quite silently by the bed of 29.
After a while the chief came in with the patronne and all the doctors.
They came to Number 29 Madame Marthe came, and I left her with them.
They talked for a few minutes with her and then went out.
I helped her get him ready, and then Joseph came with the stretcher.
I went with him down the corridor to wait at the door of the operating
room. They give the chloroform usually at the door. It seemed
dreadfully long.
I said, "You don't mind my waiting with you, do you? I'd like to."
It was such a silly thing to say that he tried to laugh at me.
I thought they would give him the chloroform here at the door of the
operating room and that I would run when he was once under. But they
threw open the doors, and wheeled the stretcher cart in, and called
to me to help lift him to the table. And then to help with this, with
that, quickly. And I stayed and helped through it all. They thought he
was going to die there on the table. Afterwards I realized how horrible
it had been. When we got back to the ward, the patronne was there with
Madame Marthe.
The patronne is a wonderful nurse. If any one can get a man through it,
she can. She is dreadful. She screams from one end of the ward to the
other and stamps her foot, and uses hideous words. But she can storm a
man back into life. And suddenly all the rage will be a coaxing, and
you know that she cares about it. "J'ai cela dans la peau," she says.
She shouted the "cinq lettres" at me, "What are you staring at? Get on
with your work. He's through that, and he's not going to die."
Number 14
Sunday, December 5th
The mother of little 14, Louis, has come to see him.
When I came into the ward this morning, I was frightened to see that
there were people about the bed of little Louis.
I don't know why we always call him little Louis, for he is a great
long boy as he lies there in his bed; he must have stood splendidly
tall and strong before.
But it was only that Madame Marthe and Madame Alice were standing
there, talking with a tall fine woman, who wore the black shawl and
small black ribbon cap of the country of Arles. The shawl and the cap
gave to the mother of little Louis that special dignity the peasant
costume always gives, oddly touching in the lonely city and in this
huge strange house of grief.
She was sitting quietly by the bed of little Louis in the corner,
talking to him and smiling, and talking to the nurses.
Little Louis was smiling with big tears rolling down his cheeks.
Madame Alice had the pail of dirty water on the floor beside her and
stood leaning on the handle of her mop. She is a big well-built woman,
handsome and sullen. She is sullen even when she does kind things. You
would not believe that she was kind. She had her skirt pinned up to
her knees and wore the huge wooden sabots she always puts on when she
scrubs the floors.
Madame Marthe stood cleaning her nails with the pansement scissors. She
had not yet put on her cap with the black streamers and the ribbon of
three colours. She has great coils of pale hair.
Once she said to me, "I suppose you wear a hat in the street?" I said,
"Usually." And she said, "I would not wear a hat if I went to see a
king."
She and Madame Alice and the mother of little Louis were all laughing
together over our especial joke, that Louis will be very wicked as soon
as he is a little better, and will make us great trouble in the ward.
Louis' father died two months ago, and Louis does not know. He is so
ill that he cannot be allowed to know. His mother had to answer all his
questions about home, and explain that his father had not been able to
come because it was lambing time. She had to smile, and make it seem
that everything was going well in the house that little Louis would
never see again. She had to make it seem as if the patronne had not
told her that little Louis was dying.
He would have liked to have had her left alone with him. But she was
grateful when one or another of us found a minute to come and stand
there and smile also.
Monday, December 6th
In the cold, rainy, windy early morning there was a regiment of
infantry, with all its camping things, battle things, marching across
the Place de la Bastille, going out.
Long blue coat and blue-covered képi, blanket rolled up in a big wheel,
knapsack and cartridge-belt, flask and drinking-cup, bayonet and gun.
And each man had a bit of mimosa or a few violets or a little tight
hard winter rosebud buttoned into his coat, or stuck in his képi, or in
the muzzle of his gun.
I think most of one smart young officer, who had three roses in his
hand. They were not the sad little roses that the south sends to the
winter streets of Paris, but great full hothouse crimson roses.
He carried his roses in his left hand, held a little before him, that
nothing might touch them, stiffly, and looked straight ahead of him as
he marched.
A woman, standing beside me to watch them go, said to me, "They are so
young."
She had a grey shawl over her head.
The band passed. I do not know what it was playing.
The woman and I stood together to watch those boys go away.
Madame Alice
Thursday, December 9th
These last days Madame Alice has been even more sullen than usual.
She arrives in the morning, they tell me--she arrives at six and I am
never there to see--with a long face, and will say good day to nobody,
and grumbles because somebody's handkerchief, or somebody's bag of
raffia grasses, or somebody's package of letters, had fallen from his
night-table to litter her floor. She grumbles about "pigs," and bangs
things.
When I arrive I find her still grumbling and banging.
This morning she was washing the face of the new 25. She washed his
poor face very gently, no hands in the world could have been kinder or
more careful than hers, or more delicate of touch, though they are big
and red, but she was grumbling all the time.
I said, "Good morning," and she hunched one shoulder.
Madame Marthe came in and said that I had better go and fetch my boiled
water before somebody else emptied the boiler.
When I was coming back with it from the office, Madame Alice was
standing by the window at the turn of the passage. She had put her pail
down on the floor, with 25's soap and things thrown down beside it. She
stood with one arm against the window-pane and her face buried in the
crook of her elbow.
I said, "Oh, Madame Alice, are you ill, Madame Alice?"
She hunched her shoulder. I put my big pitcher down by her pail on the
floor, and patted her shoulder and said, "Please, oh, please."
She said, not turning or raising her head, "They've taken him to the
children's hospital--Jeanjean, my little boy, you know; he has been
very ill all the week. A neighbour said, five days ago, she would take
him to the Clinique, there is no hour when I can get away from here to
take him. It was the neighbour who looked after him the day they sent
him home from school because he was sick. She is very good, but she has
not much time. She has got her work. She did not know how ill he was.
I told her, the first day, to take him to the Clinique, but that day
she had no time. She did not tell me. She told me that at the Clinique
they said it was nothing. She told me that every day. For five days she
did not take him. I only saw him in the nights, you know. Oh, it is
horrible when you can only see them at night."
She stopped a minute and was sobbing, but without making any noise. She
rubbed the tears out of her eyes against the back of her hand, and went
on. It was odd to hear her talk so much, like that--she whom I only
knew as sullen and silent.
"It is nearly eight at night when I get home," said she, "and I have to
leave soon after five in the morning. I was up with him all the nights,
and I was so frightened all the days. Oh, these days here!"
She stood always with her back turned, and I could only stand there,
patting her shoulder. It was queer how such big sobs made no noise at
all.
She said, "The neighbour got frightened yesterday, and took him to the
Clinique, and they said it was spinal-meningitis, and sent him then, at
once, to the children's hospital. When I got home he was gone. It was
night, they would not have let me see him at the hospital. This morning
I had to come here. But I shall get off at noon and go to him for an
hour."
She shook herself and jerked away from me.
"Now do you see?" she said, "now do you see?"
And without saying what it was she meant she took up her pail, and 25's
little bundle of things, and went on along the corridor.
Saturday, December 11th
To-day I have been seeing the little old curé of Jadis-sur-Marne. I
found out, after all this time, where he was; and went and sat with him
for an hour, in a pleasant sunny room of the house where they take care
of him. He did not know me at first, but afterwards he seemed quite
pleased. I want to tell this story of him.
One Sunday, months and months and ages and ages and ages ago, Monsieur
le Curé of Jadis-sur-Marne, began his discourse in a wrath righteous
indeed. It was the Sunday that nobody knew was to be the last Sunday of
peace.
"My dear brethren," began Monsieur le Curé, in his most angry voice.
He snapped the words out, "Mes chers frères," as if each word were a
little sharp stone shot out of a sling to sting the upturned faces of
his listeners. "My dear brethren," he began in righteous wrath, and
stopped short.
He stood in a bar of dust and sun motes, up in the old black carved
pulpit, against the grey stone pillar. Then he was a round, jolly,
rosy, busy old little curé, who got into a temper only reluctantly,
after much goading.
His church was old and beautiful and quite large. There were twenty-one
people in it: ten in the château chapel, opposite the pulpit, Madame
la Marquise and Mademoiselle and two guests in the great red-velvet
chairs, and six of the servants in the benches behind them; old
Ernestine, the curé's bonne, in her round white cap, erect, determined
to stop awake; another white cap or two, here and there, and Père
Pate's black skull-cap; two secularized sisters from the Ecole Libre,
awkward in their black hats and jackets; three little wriggling girls
whom they had managed to capture and retain on the bench between them;
some small boys down by the door; and Madelon, the twelve-year-old
daughter of the château gardener, who forsook the château pew that she
might sit nearer to Monsieur le Curé.
Madelon sat twisted round in her chair to look straight up at him and
adore, her hands in their Sunday gloves clasped intensely upon her
blueprint lap.
It was cool in the church after the last day's rain, and dark, except
where bars of sunshine and dancing sun motes struck across, and where
the altar candles were little stars.
One heard the chickens cackling in the curé's garden, and the locusts
shrilling close at the windows in the acacia trees of the cemetery, and
the children calling and laughing in the street.
"My dear brothers," began Monsieur le Curé, looking down into the round
blue eyes of Madelon.
He clutched the edge of the pulpit in both hands and leaned forward.
It was indeed tremendously that he was going to scold. He had a right
to scold. All night, in his little brown room, under the snores of old
Ernestine, he had been working himself up to the pitch for it.
Next Sunday was the Fête of the Patronage. The Grand Vicaire was to
come, all the way from Meaux. Madame la Marquise was to present a
banner.
The children romped in the street. The women put on hats and went and
stood and gossiped in the market-place. The men went fishing; the boys
went fishing.
Every Sunday it was the same thing.
In a high temper, Monsieur le Curé began, "My dear brothers," and
stopped short.
He let go of the pulpit edge and stood straight and looked over the
heads of the twenty-one of them. All the light there was in the deep
old church seemed to be upon his face.
When he looked down at his people, it was with a lovely shining of
kindliness. It was as if, suddenly, he realized how he loved them. He
loved them too much to scold.
"My dear brothers," he said. All the words became little kind caresses.
They were small humble words, poor little words, simple, like his
listeners. They seemed to have the touch of many little wings across
the faces lifted up, or to fall like showers of blossom petals.
One day, only so little a time afterwards, Monsieur le Curé stood among
a heap of charred things and broken, blackened stones.
This is what used to be the pillar of the pulpit, and under all that,
at the end there, must be buried the altar, with the cross and the
candles that used to be stars. There are things that are burned, all
black and charred, and things that are twisted. The curé cannot make
out what they are. He had not known that there was iron in the church.
Queer iron things are twisted and tortured. The new bright window he
had thought so beautiful is all broken, the reds and blues and yellows
sparkle among the stones.
There are men's boots. What are men's boots doing here, sticking up
straight out of the ruins of altars?
They are the boots of the dead men. Those things among the stones are
dead men. You go to see what the boots are doing here, and you find
that the blue-and-red heaps are dead men.
How they sink into the earth! They are trying to get back into the
earth, whence they came. They came from it and are trying to get back,
as fast as they can, into it.
This was once a church. And once upon a time, ages and ages ago, or
only some days and days ago, Monsieur le Curé stood against the pillar
and began to scold.
The women used to stand and gossip in the market-place; the children
used to romp in the cobbled street; the men used to go fishing.
The graveyard about this heap of stones, that once was a church, is
a strange place, full of trampled straw, and of long heaps of red and
blue, that end in boots. The walls of the graveyard are everywhere
pierced with holes, that often those long heaps lie under. Monsieur le
Curé does not know why the straw is there.
And so Monsieur le Curé has become a little mad.
In one of those days, it seems, he came across Madelon sitting against
a wall, quite dead. It was in the rue du Château. Much of the wall was
fallen down, but just where Madelon sat the bit of it standing was
radiant with roses. Madelon sat on the grass against the wall, her legs
stuck straight out, her hands on the grass, her head hanging forward,
tangled hair over her staring eyes, and her mouth wide open.
The curé says he does not know what it was that happened to Madelon.
By the fire, in a bright room, Monsieur le Curé talked to me of the
church that Sunday morning, and made me see it; and made me see, as if
I stood there that other day with him, the broken things, and black,
twisted things, and the things that the earth was taking back. He
talked quietly, even of Madelon, and said he was so glad that, that
last time, God had not let him scold.
The last Sunday of Peace: Remembering July 26th, 1914
When they came back from Mass, up through the château woods and the
park and across the gardens, Anne Marie and Raoul walked together, and
Anne Marie knew how happy she was.
She had been happy every day of her eighteen years, but that day she
realized it.
Before she was quite awake she had been happy because of birds and
church bells and sunshine and the fragrances of the garden. Snuggled
down in the pillows that smelled of rose petals, she was happy because
of her new white dress and the poppy hat. And as she waked she had
known that she was happy apart from all those things, those lovely
accustomed things, and far, far beyond them, because of Raoul. Because
Raoul would be waking there, under the same roof. Because he would be
waiting for her when she went down the stairs in the white dress and
poppy hat.
He had been waiting at the foot of the stairs. He had had a huge box of
white orchids sent out for her from Paris.
He had gone to Mass with her and his mother, and her mother. She had
sat three chairs away from him in the dusk of the château chapel.
After Mass the two mothers walked ahead together, and she and Raoul
followed close behind, more nearly alone together than they had ever
been before.
He talked all the time; and she dimpled and blushed and was happy, and
knew that she was happy, but could not say a word.
They went slowly through the woods, where there were quantities of
orange toadstools after the rain, and all the birds were singing; and
along the avenues of the park, and across the stiff gardens.
Anne Marie's father was out on the terrace. He was walking up and down
the terrace and gesturing very strangely all by himself as he walked.
Across the sunny spaces of lawn and gravel, box border and clipped yew
and flowers, the château was all sunlit, its steep blue roofs and old
soft yellow walls.
Anne Marie's father came down the terrace steps to meet her mother and
Raoul's mother, and, as they stood together he seemed to be telling
them something.
Anne Marie thought how odd of him to gesture like that. Suddenly a
wonderful idea and daring came to Anne Marie. She stopped and stood
still there in the little gravel path, between the box edges and
beds of roses and heliotrope and petunias that were so sweet in the
sunshine. She found herself possessed of a great courage. She would
stand there, and Raoul would stand there, and they would be quiet,
quite alone together. And she would dare to talk to him. She would
dare to tell him things. There were so many things for her to tell and
ask. Everything of life and of loving. She thought the droning of the
bees was a hot and golden sound. It was the greatest, happiest, most
wonderful moment of all her life.
But Raoul said, "Shall we not go on, Anne Marie; there is something the
matter, shall we not go on and see what it is?"
His mother had turned around where she stood at the top of the steps
and was looking at Raoul.
The grey stone flags of the terrace were scattered over with all the
Paris papers, that Anne Marie's father must have thrown down, and
trampled on as he walked up and down the terrace.
He said to Raoul, coming up the steps, "Well, this time it is certain.
Whatever they try to show, every word in the papers means it. It will
be inside the week, it is I who tell you."
"Raoul, Raoul," said Raoul's mother, very white.
But Raoul, up the steps in two bounds, did not hear her. "If only it
may be! How we've hoped it! Oh, sir, do you really think it?"
Anne Marie's mother had put her parasol and Mass book down on the broad
stone balustrade of the terrace. She stooped over and took up one of
the papers that lay on the flags.
"It can't be," she said, reading. She spread the paper out on the top
of the balustrade and stood pulling off her gloves as she read. "It
can't be," she said again, pulling off first one soft grey glove and
then the other.
"It can't be," said Raoul's mother, always looking at Raoul.
Anne Marie's father, beginning to pace the terrace again, said, "It
will be, it will be!"
Raoul said, "It's got to be," standing very straight and looking at
nobody.
Anne Marie thought, oh dear, oh dear, now they will talk and talk; and
she had so wanted Raoul to stay with her down in the garden.
Cantine, Christmas
All the babies seem to me to be blonde and of exactly the same size and
quite square, about one year old, square, and very adorable. I never
can remember which are the boys and which the girls.
The mothers come from, we don't know where; and are, we don't know what.
Last year there was written on a card and posted on the wall by the
door, a thing that I think rather beautiful--
"Toute femme enciente, ou qui nourrit son enfant, peut venir tous les
jours prendre ici ses repas de midi et du soir, sans craindre aucune
question."
They came, at noon and at dusk, sick, ugly, stupid things, twice a day
like that, from two hundred and fifty to three hundred of them. Bearing
the children of soldiers, the children that will be France, they came
without need of more than making each of them her X in the book on the
shelf by the door.
There is not room for more than forty-five at a time at the tables in
the room that used to be a butcher's shop. They had to wait in turn
outside in the street.
Outside in the ugly, forlorn street they waited, an ugly, forlorn line,
in wind or rain.
They all seemed frightened, not of the things that there really were to
fear, like sickness and poverty and war, but of just opening the door
and coming in and making their mark in the book, and finding places at
the tables.
They would have the door always kept shut. The steam of the soup was
thick and horrid, always, in the room. I hate the smell of the poor. I
hated those deformed, bedraggled, dulled women, as I served their soup.
I hated them, because they would have the door kept shut. But I loved
them, because their children would be France.
This year we keep Christmas for the babies.
It is odd how beautiful any woman is with a baby in her arms.
Especially if she has only a shawl to wrap around herself and the
baby, where it lies in the hollow of her arm. The faded, stained, worn
shawl, drawn close about her head, falls in long lines down over her
shoulders, and is gathered up in new folds around the nestling baby,
the little soft shape of it, the little head, round, against her throat.
Like that each one of the women makes you think of a beautiful,
wonderful thing.
Perfectly Well
The patronne was standing by the bed of little 10.
I said, "It does not go well, little 10?"
He said, "Not too well, madame." His poor face was twitching, and his
poor hands on the sheet.
The patronne said to me, "He has given us a bad night, that sort of a
horror there." She stood with her hands purple on her broad hips and
looked at him, and said, "Espèce d'horreur, veux-tu finir de nous en
m----"
He laughed and I laughed.
It is dreadful, but I can bear it better like that. The little good
sisters of other, different hospitals, the ladies of the Red Cross, the
calm and tenderness and prayers, how strange it would seem.
Little 10 laughed.
"Oh, you laugh!" said the patronne, "and all the trouble you make us!
Wait till you are well!" She said, "Attends que tu sois guéri, et je te
f----trai un coup sur le citron."
Madame Marthe came with the hypodermic syringe and tubes and glasses in
a basin. Her hands were trembling. I love her when her hands tremble.
The patronne said to me, "He is off for another little party of
billiards."
That meant another operation.
I said, "You don't mind, little 10?"
He said, "Not too much, madame."
I said, "You'll be better to-morrow."
He said, "I'll be better to-morrow."
"Name of God," said the patronne, "of course he'll be better to-morrow."
Next day, when I tried not to cry because his bed was empty, she said
to me, "It was no lie: he is better, isn't he?"
Hospital, New Year's Day, 1916
What made me dreadfully want to cry was that they all, every one of
them, wished me good health--little Louis, who is dying, and all the
rest of them.
The Apache Baby--Wednesday, January 5th--Cantine
They telephoned from the cantine that the baby of the girl Alice was
dead at the hospital, and that the funeral was to be from there that
afternoon at three o'clock, and that Alice wanted me to come.
Mademoiselle Renée, the économe, who telephoned, said it was the apache
girl with the ear-rings.
I don't know why she wanted me to come to the funeral of her baby. Of
the nearly three hundred women who came twice every day to the cantine,
she had never been especially my friend. Her baby had been a sick
little thing, and I had been touched by her wild love of it. It had no
father, she told me. We never ask questions at the cantine, but she had
been pleased to tell me that. She had said she was glad, because, so,
it was all her own. She had rocked it as she held it wrapped in the
folds of her red shawl, and shaken her long bright ear-rings, laughing
down at it, over her bowl of soup. And now it is dead.
Claire came to me. We had just time, if we took a taxi, to get to the
hospital, stopping on the way for some flowers. It was raining more or
less, and very dark.
At the hospital they sent us round to the back, to a sort of shed
opening on a street that was being built up, or had been torn down, I
don't know which, desolate in the rain.
In the room of the shed there were two families in black, two mothers
with dingy crape veils, and two dead babies in unpainted pine boxes
that were open.
The baby in the box on the right was quite big, the size of the most
expensive doll one could get for a rich little girl at Christmas. There
was a quite fine white tin wreath on the floor, tilted up against the
pine box. The family of the bigger baby was quite numerous, half a
dozen women, an old man, and several children. They all had shoes, and
several of the women had umbrellas, and one of them had a hat.
In the smaller box was the baby of Alice, very, very small and pinched
and blue, even more small and pinched and blue than when she used to
bring it to the cantine. The family of Alice consisted of a small boy
with bare feet and no hat, a small girl with a queer coloured skirt and
felt slippers and a bit of black crape over her red hair, and a boy of
perhaps seventeen, also in felt slippers, with his coat collar turned
up and a muffler round his chin and his cap dragged down over his
eyes. Alice had a hat and a crape veil and a black coat and skirt, and
down-trodden, shapeless shoes much too big for her.
There was a small bunch of violets in the pine box with the baby.
We put our roses down on the floor at the foot of the box.
Both babies had on the little white slips that the hospital gives.
The family of the bigger baby, and the brother and sister of Alice,
stared at us.
The mother of the bigger baby stood leaning against the wall, her head
against the whitewash, her two hands over her eyes. She was making a
queer little noise through her teeth. She kept it up all the time we
were in the shed, a sort of hissing. She never once uncovered her eyes.
Alice was standing close, close beside her baby in the pine box, just
looking down at it. She never took her eyes from it. She is a tall,
straight girl, but she was bent over, as if she were feeble and old.
Her veil was pushed back from her face. It had been wet, and the black
had run over her face. But it must have been the rain, for she was not
crying at all. All the time in the shed she never moved or cried at all.
Her little brother and sister stood back as if they were afraid of her.
Claire and I waited near the door of the shed.
For a long time we waited like that.
Then two croquemorts came, in their shining black clothes. One of them
had a sort of hammer in his hand.
They went to the box of the bigger baby, and one of them picked up the
cover of the box and put it on, and the other began to drive the nails
in.
When he drove the first nail in, the woman with her eyes covered so she
could not see him, heard, and knew what it was, and began to shriek.
With her hands over her eyes she stood against the wall and shrieked.
The croquemort drove in all the nails, and the woman kept on shrieking.
Then the other croquemort put the tin wreath on the lid of the box, and
then both of them came over to our baby.
Alice had been just looking and looking at her baby. When the men came,
and one of them took up the lid of the box from the floor, and the
other stood with his hammer, she gathered herself up as if she would
spring upon the men who would take her little dead thing from her and
put it away for ever. I thought she would fight over it, quite mad. The
little brother and sister stood away from her, shivering.
But what she did was to stoop and take up our roses from where they
lay on the floor, and put them into the pine box with the baby. She
put them all in about the baby, covering it with them. She hid it away
under roses and then stood close, close to it, while the croquemort
drove the nails in, all the nails, one by one.
Then one of the croquemorts took up the box of the bigger baby and
carried it out of the shed and put it, with the tin wreath on the top
of it, into a hearse that there was waiting on the left of the door.
And the other croquemort took up the box of Alice's baby and carried it
out, and put it into a hearse that was waiting on the right of the door.
The family of the bigger baby followed away, after the hearse and one
of the croquemorts, toward the depths of the city, two of the women
leading the baby's mother, who still kept her hands over her eyes, but
was not shrieking any more, only sobbing. I know no more of them after
that.
Alice went out of the door alone, and turned to the right, after the
hearse in which was her dead child.
Our croquemort would have gone ahead of her, but she would not let him
pass. She would not have him between her and her baby. She kept close,
close to the hearse, almost touching it, all the way.
The croquemort walked behind her, and the brothers and sister walked
behind him, and Claire and I at the end of it.
We went through, a tangle of poor streets, narrow and crowded. People
drew back out of our way; some of them crossed themselves, and all of
them were silent for an instant as the apache baby passed.
We went through wide, forlorn streets of coal yards and warehouses and
factories. The carters and labourers in those streets stopped to look
at us and make the sign of the Cross, for the baby passing.
We went over the canal bridge and the railroad bridges, and along
desolate streets of the outskirts, all in the rain.
We went by barracks, where many blue coats, going about their duties,
or standing idly about, drew up to salute the baby in its poor little
unpainted rough box.
At the fortifications many blue coats were digging trenches, and they
all looked up and stopped their work to salute the baby.
Twice we met groups of blue coats marching along the muddy empty roads,
and both times the officer halted his men to salute the apache baby
going by.
The bigger brother walked like a true apache, slouching and slinking
along, shoulders hunched up, head sunk down, face hidden between his
muffler and the peak of his cap. The smaller brother and the sister
slouched too. But Alice walked quite straight, her head up, close,
close to her child.
So we came to the cemetery, in at the gates, and along a street of
little marble houses, to a field where there were only wooden and black
iron crosses, and to a hole that was dug in the red wet earth.
There was a man waiting for us by the hole. He helped the croquemort to
take the box out of the hearse and put it in the hole.
Alice stood close, close to the edge, looking down into the grave.
The rest of us stood together behind her.
The croquemort gave her a little spade, and told her what to do with it.
Then she stooped down and dug up a spadeful of earth and threw it into
the hole where they had put the box.
Each of us went in turn to give earth to earth, and then it was over.
Alice stood close, close to the edge of the hole, and looked and looked
down into it.
The croquemort said something to Alice, but she did not move. He then
spoke to the bigger brother, who shuffled up to Alice and tugged at her
sleeve.
But still she did not move.
The smaller brother began to cry.
Then the sister went to Alice and pulled at her other sleeve.
"Take her away," the croquemort said to me.
I said, "Dear, we must go."
Without looking at me, she said, "I--I stay here." She stood close,
close to the hole and looked at the little pine box, and said again,
quite quietly, "I stay here."
I said, "You cannot stay," stupidly, as if we were discussing any
ordinary coming or going.
Her little sister, pulling at her skirt, said, "Say then, ask thou the
lady to let thee go to supper at the cantine."
"The cantine is for those who have babies," Alice answered. Then she
looked at me for the first time, her great wild eyes, in her face that
was stained and streaked where the black from the wet crape had run.
Gégène's Croix de Guerre, One Thursday
When Gégène went to the Invalides to receive his Croix de Guerre, in
the great Court of Honour, there was no one to go with him except
Madame Marthe and me.
Gégène belongs to nobody. He is an "enfant de l'Assistance Publique."
There is nobody nearer to him than the peasants he was hired out to
work for, somewhere down in Brittany.
I do not know whether or not they were kind to him, whether or not
they cared about his going off to war, or would take interest in the
honours he has won. We know nothing but what the Assistance knows about
him; and he himself can tell us nothing, for he cannot speak at all.
His wound was in the head; he has been trepanned twice. He may live a
long time, he is such a strong young boy, but he will never be able to
speak. His right side is stiffened, he cannot use that hand, and the
foot drags. Except for that, and not being able to speak, he is quite
well.
Nobody knows how much he understands of it all, or what he thinks and
feels. Sometimes he looks very sad. His boyish face, refined by pain,
haunts me when I am away from the hospital. But sometimes he seems
quite content, happy to be just well housed and fed and petted by us.
We do not know what will become of him when he can no longer stay in
the hospital.
Madame Marthe says, "What would you have? he is not the only one."
But she is very kind to him, and when she has a half-day's leave she
often takes him out with her, for a little treat.
She and I hurried through the dressings this morning and had everything
done, our cylinders sent to the sterilization, the apparatus in order,
the ward quite neat, in time to go and have lunch, the three of us
together, in a big café of the Boulevards.
Gégène was too excited to eat, and so was little Madame Marthe, in her
cap of the "Ville de Paris" and her blue woollen shawl. She had to
leave it for me to cut up Gégène's chicken and pour his red wine for
him.
It rained; the crowd in the Place des Invalides stood under dripping
umbrellas.
In the Court of Honour the arcades were packed with wet people, and out
in the great central space there was no shelter but umbrellas for the
poor great splendid heroes like Gégène.
There they all stood together, those who could stand, in all the pride
and tragedy of their crutches and their bandages--one little blinded
officer with his head cocked sideways like a bird's. And those who
could not stand had chairs and benches; two or three were there on
stretchers.
There was a group of women in deep mourning,--some of them with
children--who had come to receive the decorations of their dead
husbands or sons.
There were the great men of the General Staff,--maybe the Minister of
War, maybe the President, maybe the Generalissimo himself--with all
their high officers around them, already arrived, near the entrance,
astir with preparation.
Out in the centre of the Court, grouped almost motionlessly, were the
men who waited to receive their honours.
We could see our Gégène, standing up very tall and straight among them.
"Isn't he nice?" I said to Madame Marthe, "Isn't he nice?"
But Madame Marthe was crying--funny little tears, and her nose very
red. "Oh!" she said, "Oh, what will happen when that man with the gold
braid comes to Gégène? He will speak to Gégène, and Gégène cannot
answer! He will hold out his hand to Gégène, and Gégène will not be
able to take it!"
We clutched each other in panic, and then the music broke out into all
the splendour of the Marseillaise.
Empty Memories
Seventeen months after the day when he went out for the first time, he
was killed beside his mitrailleuse.
He had been home in the meanwhile twice on leave, and there had
been nothing changed. He had won many honours, and she supposed the
other woman had been proud of him. For herself she had seen him very
little and always pleasantly. She was glad now that it had been only
pleasantly.
But it was the day of that first August, the day of his first going,
that one day, that one hour, she kept living again and again through.
It kept being present with her, curiously.
He had arrived--he had telegraphed--about four of the afternoon, she
did not know from where. He would have to leave again before five
o'clock. She knew, of course, with whom he had been. She thought,
waiting for him, what an irony that it should be like this, after all
the bitterness, he was coming back to her, and to the old house of his
people, in the street of many gardens.
She thought it would be awkward for them both. What could they say to
one another?
She wondered if it had been terrible to him to leave the other woman.
Probably the other woman was beautiful. All those women were beautiful.
She thought, perhaps that other woman loved him and cared what happened
to him.
Her two little boys were playing in the room.
The great closed rooms, to which she had brought them back hurriedly
from the seaside, fascinated them.
The bigger little one, in his sailor suit with the huge collar was
saying, "That's the old witch's cave, Toto, in the snow mountain."
The smaller one, with the curls and the Russian blouse, said, "Oh,
Zizi!"
"Yes; and, Toto, that big lump is the giant, sleeping."
"Oh, Zizi!"
Then their father came.
The little boys hung back and stared at him; they never had known him
really well.
Their mother stood up and went to meet him, across the wide room.
"You've had a horrid journey," she said.
"I've been fifty hours in the train," he answered. "Hallo, small boys,
there!"
"Toto," said Zizi, "he's going to be a soldier!"
"Oh, Zizi!" said Toto.
The bigger boy came over to his father. "I know a chap," he said, "it's
the son of a friend of mademoiselle's, whose father is dead and cannot
be a soldier."
"Poor chap," said his father.
His wife said, "Old Denis has got your things together. All the
other men-servants are gone. He has put you something to eat on the
dining-room table."
He said, "Will you come with me, do you mind? I've things to say to
you, and there is so little time."
But when they sat together at one corner of the big shining table, he
did not seem to know what to say. He tried to eat, but it seemed as if
he could not eat. He pushed the plate away and leaned his elbows on the
table and his head in his hands.
She thought she would like to do something for him, but did not know
what to do. Again she said, "It must have been dreadful in the train."
"It was wonderful," he said. Then, sitting still with his face hidden,
he went on: "We were singing all the time. Wherever the train stopped
people gave us flowers; the whole train was full of flowers, you know.
They were most of them boys of the young classes in the train. We
sang the most absurd things--nursery rhymes, and old cannons, 'Frères
Jacques' and 'Coeur de Lise,' and those, you know. What is the one
about 'Papa Lapin'? None of us could remember the one about 'Papa
Lapin,' you know."
"I don't know," she replied. It had always annoyed her, his trick of
saying, "You know." She sat playing with something on the table.
He said again, "The whole train was full of flowers. 'Papa Lapin,'
'Papa Lapin'--how irritating, you know, when one can't remember."
He sat up suddenly erect, and said, "You'll take the boys and go down
to the old place and look after things. It has always bored you, but
after all it is for Zizi. And be good to my mother, will you, though
you don't like her--she, she remembers '70. And I've not been of much
use to her. I've not been of much use to you, nor to any one." He
stopped short.
It was odd that suddenly she, who never had thought much about him,
or felt things at all about him, should have known this thing. She
had known as she sat there with him, alone in the dining-room, by the
untouched things on the table, that he never would come back. He was
one of those who never come back.
Hospital
Often I am sad because I cannot worry enough about the 11, Charles.
I forget him even when I am in the ward. His is the bed I see first
when I look through the holes of the paint in the glass-topped door,
opposite, away at the far end of the ward. There he has been, always,
every day, through all the endless months since the Marne, propped up
against a table board and two pillows and a sheet of black rubber. He
breathes always more and more painfully, and coughs always more and
more. The fever lines on his chart zigzag up and down, in long dreadful
points. He has become very cross and exacting. He scolds us in little
feeble gasps, with little feeble gestures. He is twenty-one years old,
and has very long eyelashes.
Yesterday when I went to say good-bye to him at the end of the day
he was crying there in his corner, quietly, all by himself. His long
eyelashes were all wet. I said, "Oh, little Charles, oh, little
Charles!" and kept saying it over and over, and had nothing else in
all the world to say. I patted his hands, that always lie both of them
together upon the strap which is fastened round the bar at the foot of
the bed, by which he is sometimes able to pull himself up.
His hands are white and thin and crooked, like the roots of things that
belong in the earth; while I patted his hands I was thinking that they
did not seem to belong in the light and air at all.
This morning I thought, "How absurd to have brought him a little pot of
cream!" A little pot of cream for a man who is dying.
Hautiquet
Hautiquet has gone back to the front. He would not let them tell me
he was going. I never saw him to say good-bye. Last night, I said, as
usual, "Bon soir, tout le monde, au revoir à demain!" And Hautiquet
said with the rest, "A demain, Madame." He left a little package to be
given to me after he was gone.
He was one of the older ones. He had been ill in the first winter
with rheumatism and pleurisy. He went back and fought all summer, and
all through the Champagne, and till Christmas. Then he got rheumatism
again, this time in his eyes. He has been nearly blind since then, here
in the hospital.
He was a clumsy peasant who never talked much. And of what he did say I
could only understand about half. I did not know that he thought about
me at all.
But in the little package he left for me there was an aluminum heart,
made out of the aluminum from a shell. Madame Marthe says he had been
nearly all the time working at it, because he had clumsy hands and
could scarcely see. He had had much trouble getting the shape right. He
had cut my initials on one side of it and his on the other, crookedly,
because he was so nearly blind.
Jean Fernand
He had curly yellow hair and big blue eyes. He got well terribly fast.
I was wishing all the time that he would take longer about it. He was
so young.
His eyes were so blue, and round, and had seen all the horrors of the
great retreat. The look of those things had stayed in his round young
blue eyes.
He told me he was afraid of going back, but that he was glad to go
because "tous les copains sont là." He said he couldn't bear to think
of them there, when he was safe out of it. "It is as if they were
fighting for me," he said, "and being wounded for me, and dying."
I don't know why I write of him in the past tense, for I have always
the most amusing letters from him, from there. He is near Verdun. This
morning I got from him a little snapshot a copain had made of him, down
on all-fours in the bottom of his trench feeding a baby pig out of a
bottle.
Wednesday, February 9th
Post Card
Boinet is very happy to-day. He has news of his people at last. Since
he left them in the first days, all through these months and months, it
has been as if they had been simply swept away out of the world.
Everything that Boinet loved was swept away by the great black wave of
the war. Into what depth of the end of all things all his life has been
swept away! He has been imagining and imagining. He says, all the time
in the trenches he was tortured by imagining things that might have
happened to his three little sisters. Boinet is twenty-two, and the
three sisters were younger than he, and beautiful, he says. Odd, how
one speaks always in the past tense of people whom the war has taken
into its dark spaces. Boinet tells how he loved his mother, as if it
were a thing of another life.
And here is his post card saying that they are all quite well, and
signed by every one of them.
For nearly a year Boinet has been in the hospital, Number 16. He has
troubled about his horrible burns scarcely at all, but we have thought
he would go mad torturing himself with imagining things that might have
happened to his people.
By means of an agency here, and the Mairie at Tourcoing, it was
possible, at last, for his people to send him a post card of six lines.
It came this morning; I have had to read it to him about fifty times
over.
It says that they are all very well, and for him to give news of
Pierre, the husband of his sister Josette, and it is signed with all
their dear, dear names, Père, Mère, Josette, Marie, Cloton.
Only it was sad, for Boinet knows that the husband of poor little
Josette, married that last July was killed long ago in one of the first
battles of the war.
The New 25
He is of Morocco, brown and very lonely, and always shivering with
cold. He speaks scarcely any French. His great dark eyes look to one
with all the sadness of the eyes of animals that are dumb. Nobody
understands him. He smiles up at us, with his beautiful white teeth and
his big dumb eyes, and does not understand what we are saying. He makes
me little magic-lanterns out of orange rinds, and tells me long stories
about them, of which I understand not a word.
Once when I went back, just for an afternoon's visit to the hospital,
I was wearing a bright blue silk scarf, and he took it and held it and
cried over it, and would not give it back to me. I cannot imagine of
what it reminded him, why he cried, or why he loved it.
He has three tiny little wooden dolls, scarcely bigger than almonds
and wonderfully carved, that he never will let us touch. Madame Marthe
thinks that they are strange gods of his; but I think they represent
three children, far away, in lands where skies are blue, like my scarf.
He is only slightly wounded; very soon he will have to unwrap himself
from my big white woollen shawl, and go away again to battles.
And I suppose I shall never know anything more about him.
Marketing
He was standing half turned away from the others, the fat old woman in
the woollen knitted shawl and a girl with a pretty brown bare head. He
was holding a big market basket very carefully in both hands. I thought
there was something odd about the careful way he held it and the way he
stood, his head turned to one side and hanging a bit.
The old woman and the girl were talking very much about the cabbages,
with the woman of the push-cart, also old and also wearing a knitted
woollen shawl.
In the stir and noise of the street market the way the tall broad young
soldier stood so still and silent did seem odd. And he was holding the
basket with such very great care.
There was a live white goose in the basket. It kept stretching its
long neck up over the rim of the basket and peering about, opening and
shutting its yellow bill and hissing at people.
When the old woman and the girl had finished their discussion and
selected their cabbage, they pushed the cabbage into the market basket
along with the goose, and all the time the soldier held the basket
carefully.
Then the old woman put her arm through one of his arms, and the girl
put her arm through the other. As he turned to go where they would
take him, I saw that he was blind; the wound had healed, but it was as
if his eyes were closed. He very carefully let go the basket with one
hand, and with the other hand, the girl's rather impatient touch on his
elbow, he made a salute to where he thought the woman of the push-cart
was standing, and then the old woman and the girl led him away with the
basket.
Hospital
The wards of "our" floor get always all the light there is. When there
is sunlight it all comes in and picks the dust motes up and sets them
dancing, down steep slants and ladders. When there is wind it sobs and
sings along the wards and corridors. The rain makes wide sweeps of the
great windows, and mists press very close against them and get into the
wards and drift there. When there was snow, in these few days the rooms
were all full of its whiteness. Almost it was as if its silence were
there, and its peace.
Saturday, March 5th
The night was full of great bells booming, Verdun, Verdun, Verdun. And
yet there were no bells.
I never saw a darker morning come to Paris. The darkness came into the
room, thick and wet and cold.
I had my breakfast by firelight.
The crows are back already in the garden; the bare black treetops were
full of them this dark morning, and not one of them stirred or made a
sound.
The lamps of the trams were lighted, and the lamps of the streets and
quays and bridges.
The river is very high, the trees of the margins stand drowning.
The snow of these last days has stayed on in places, as yellow as fog
and smoke.
In the old great beautiful courtyards of the hospital the snow is quite
deep, on the roofs and ledges of red brick and grey stone, and on the
huge square old cobbles, and on the black tracery of trees and bushes
and of the vines along the walls.
The buds, that were soft and green last week, are black now; I was
afraid to go and touch them and find them frozen hard.
The blackbird was singing. He has been back for nine days. It was
dreadful in the dark and cold to hear him singing. How terrible all
lovely things are become!
Same day
In the half dark I came home along the canal. In these nights, coming
home from the hospital, I have learned always more and more that the
canal is beautiful, curving down between its old poor black tumbling
houses, under its black bridges.
To-night the few lights of the quays and of windows fell into the water
of the canal, just odds and ends of gold.
I stopped and stood and looked.
It had been a bad day in my ward.
I thought, how beautiful ugly things are become!
Saturday night before Easter
The cool wet fresh smells of the garden, and of all the gardens of the
quarter, come in at my wide window. It is almost midnight, the rain
has stopped, and it is not cold any more. Sometimes the crows talk
together from the top of the trees where their nests are, above the old
low roofs my window looks across. There has been for days now, in all
the rain and cold, a drift of green about the trees, the fine green
mesh of a veil that seems to float, it is so bright and frail, about
the black wintry tree-trunks and boughs and branches. The blackbirds
came back last week to the garden.
But it is only to-night that one can believe in spring.
In the wet sky, over the roofs and chimneys, and the treetops, there
are some stars that hang as big and near as lamps. At dawn perhaps the
nightingale will be singing.
Easter Day
It is wonderful that spring should come on Easter Day.
One waked--and lo, winter was over and passed. There was a moment, in
waking, of not being able to believe at all in unhappiness.
The nightingale was singing, the sun was coming up out of the filmy
leaves of the garden, the bells of all the churches were pouring out
Easter.
The river was misty in the early morning, under the sunshine, mauve and
opal and blue. The trees of the quays, in their fragile leaf, seemed to
drift in the mist and sunshine. I could not tell if the trees were gold
or green in the Tuileries gardens. They were quite golden against the
long purple mass of the Louvre, and quite golden up the river, where
there is an especially bright blur of them under the purple towers and
gable of Notre Dame.
The Halles were full of country and spring.
My own poor ugly canal had colours and lines of spring about it; its
dingy, dark old houses were lifted into a sky so lovely that they
seemed to have become quite lovely too, and its water, under the poor
bridges, was full of gold and blue and purple and deep shining.
All the birds were singing in the great courtyards of the hospital, and
all the opening buds sang too, and the green, green grass in its close
bindings of stone.
Cordier--his face again bandaged, for he has been worse of late--tried
to tell me something. I could make out, "Nouveaux, Verdun, chez vous,
très grands blessés," and then there was to open the door upon the
ward's new tragedies and glories.
Frogs
She, his mother, wished he wouldn't be so sweet. It was what she had
longed for since he was a little boy, an indifferent, cold little
child, and dreamed of. It made it difficult for her not to break down.
And how dreary that would be for him, who was so glad to come home.
Always he had been very bored at home. He never since he was at all
grown-up--he was twenty-one--had stayed an hour more than was necessary
in the old dark sad castle. Now he had six days, just six days, for his
own, to do with whatever he chose, away from those places of death, and
it seemed that there was nothing he wanted but the old dull things that
always before had so bored him.
She had been coming up from the village in the soft wet April
afternoon, by the wide central avenue of the parterres between the
little clipped yew trees, when he came out to the terrace. She had an
instant's sick terror of thinking he was killed, and that this was
her vision of him. But he was calling to her, and laughing. She had
stopped, and stood quite still, and he had come eagerly, running down
the steps to her.
They had six days together.
Often she had thought of the old strong castle that it was a place
meant for great things to happen in, glories and disasters. Small
things were of no matter in it. There had been no room bright and light
enough for a little child to be gay in. Her baby's room had had stone
walls and a high carved ceiling and windows four feet deep. If ever
he had laughed and shouted, his little voice had been lost among old
echoes. How could any child not have been afraid of the shadows that
trailed and lurked along the corridors and upon the stairs.
She specially remembered her little son standing with Miss on the top
of the terrace steps, under the great Watch Tower, never running to
meet her as she came up through the garden, the shadow of the stern old
house prisoning him, like some dark spell, in his little white sailor
dress.
Now, he had come to meet her eagerly, as she had so used to wish he
would.
In the six days he was all the things to her that she had ever dreamed
of. He was her little boy who needed her. He had wild gay moments, when
his gaiety swept her along, and moments that needed her comforting.
Then it was their last day together, a softly raining day.
In the morning they went for a long tramp through their own woods and
on into the forest, deeper and deeper. All the forest ways were full
of wet blue hyacinths and songs of thrushes. The little rain made music
in the April branches, and the wet smells were as incense in the forest
aisles. When they came home he was hungry. Nothing would do but that
they should go down to the village to the Place de l'Eglise and get
spice bread and barley sugar from old Madame Champenot, as he had used
to do when he was a small boy to whom his mother gave five sous for
being good.
They must go down the terrace steps and along the avenue to the Queen's
Bosquet, where the old statues stood together dressed in ivy, and
through the little stern gate in the rampart walls, and across the moat
by the new bridge, that was so old, to the Place of the church.
Thatched roofs and tiled roofs were touched with spring wherever moss
and lichen clung to them, green and grey and yellow.
He had gone into the little shop, and she had waited outside, not able
to talk to any one.
The great Watch Tower of the castle, and the low square grey tower of
the church, and all the crooked old tall black chimney-pots seemed to
swim in the blue of the sky.
Waiting there she felt that the coming of spring was sad almost past
bearing. She thought, soon the frogs in the castle moats would be
singing their lonesome song.
Afterwards they went round to the stables, from which all the horses
were gone, and he was sad to think how long he had forgotten his little
old pony, scarcely bigger than a dog.
In the afternoon he must go everywhere about the house, to all the
old rooms and corridors and stairways, that he never before had known
he loved. She must go with him, through the great dim attics, and up
the tower stairs, and out on to the battlements, to the sunset; down
into the great stone-vaulted kitchens, and the cellars that had been
dungeons. They went laughingly at first. But afterwards they did not
laugh any more. It had come to have the sacredness of a pilgrimage,
their small journeying.
He talked quite gaily while they were at dinner in the long dining-hall
under the minstrel's gallery.
But when they went to her little study afterwards together, they both
were very silent.
There was a fire burning, but all the windows were open.
And as they sat there, almost silently together, they heard the first
frogs singing in the castle moat. He laughed, and would have her tell
him the story of the Frog Princess, that he never had cared for her to
tell him when he was a little boy.
She knew that she would never listen to the frogs again without
remembering that night.
She wondered if the memory would become an agony to her. It seemed to
her strange that, caring so much, she could not know.
Thursday, April 27th
Under the walls of St. Germain des Prés, and the chestnut trees in
their spring misty leaf of amber and topaz and ruby, a vendor of, I
don't know what, had set up a little booth and shaded it with an indigo
blue bit of canvas. The shade was deep purple under the blue canvas,
and brass and bronze and copper and rust-red things had vague shapes in
the shadow.
It was so beautiful that I was happy for all of a minute, passing in
the tram on my way to the cantine.
The Boy with Almond Eyes
They tell me that when they suffer I make little growling noises in my
throat. They laugh and say, "Now the little Madame is angry!"
I am angry, I am furious. I am furious against suffering. I hate
suffering.
If they scream I do not mind so much, but when they suffer silently, it
is terrible.
Once the ward doctor thought I was going to cry.
I was holding the stump of a boy's leg while they dressed it. The leg
had been cut off at the Front, hurriedly, anyhow, and the nerves left
exposed.
The boy shuddered and quivered all over, and would not make a sound,
and grew rigid with pain, stiff, and quite cold, and never made a sound.
The doctor, with the probe in his rubber-gloved hands, looked at me,
and said, "You are going to cry! You must not cry before the wounded,
it unnerves them."
And then I heard myself growling, with dreadful big words of the
patronne's smothered under the growls.
And the little boy laughed out, through everything, just like a
mischievous bad little boy.
Monday, May 1st
To-day is so beautiful, many people must have been happy for a moment
just in waking. It is so difficult not to be happy. It is such a
wonderful thing to open one's blinds to a sunshiny May morning. And
then there has to be the next moment.
May 3rd
In other years also the spring was sad. There was always that exquisite
lovely poignant sadness of spring.
These days are too beautiful. It seems as if one could not bear them.
I think it is because so much beauty makes one want happiness.
One cannot understand, in such loveliness, why one is not happy.
Something is asked of us that we cannot answer.
I remember Roselyne's saying, long before there was war, one sunset,
down by the sea in the south--
"So much happiness would be needed to fill the beauty of the day."
May 4th
Yet perhaps in this cruel year spring is less cruel. Not to be happy
is, in this year, the inevitable thing. One is less lonely in each
his own special lack of happiness. And each one may think he would be
happy, perfectly, if only there were no war.
Hospital, Friday, May 5th
They have taken away all my little soldiers. I did not know at all. I
came just as usual, and did not notice any unusual confusion. I heard
much noise as I ran up the stairs, but there is always noise in the
corridors.
When I got to the top of the stairs, there was the last batch of them,
in their patched faded old uniforms, with their crutches and bandages
and their bundles, all packed into the lift that was just started down.
I could not even see who they were.
Some one called "Madame, oh, Madame!"
I think it was Barbet, the little 4.
I turned to run down the stairs to catch them up at the bottom, as
they would get out of the lift, but Madame Marthe came out of the
patronne's room, with a huge jar, of I don't know what, in her arms,
and called to me, "Quick, the new ones will be arriving. Fetch our
sheets from Madame Bayle!"
Twenty-six beds and ten stretcher beds all left empty.
Every one is gone, except little Charles who is dying, and 14, whose
arm has just been amputated. I don't know where they are gone. Some to
the Maison Blanche and some to St. Maurice, some to their dépôts, some
to country hospitals. The patronne has had no time to tell me where
they are gone. When she has time she will have forgotten, and cannot
trouble to look up the lists of them. Madame Marthe does not know. She
does not care. She is used to it.
But I--I am not used to it. I have loved them. I had nursed them so
long, and done so many odds and ends of things for them, silly things
and tragic things. I had helped them to get well. Really and truly I
had helped them to get well. I had been so happy to have helped them.
And now I do not know what has become of them.
Hospital--Arrival, Saturday, 6th
They are very tired. They want to be let alone. They do not care what
happens to them, or to the little queer odds and ends of things in
their bundles.
They were bathed in the admission room; Madame Marthe and Madame Alice
were called there. Madame Madeline threw out their dirty torn clothes,
and the boots of those who had boots, to Madame Bayle in the hall.
Madame Bayle made Joseph take all that away, and gave me each man's
own little things to put on the night table of his bed, his képi and
his béret, if it were not lost, a pipe, a tobacco pouch, perhaps a big
nickel watch, some letters, the photograph of a girl or an old woman,
a purse with a few sous in it. Several of them have medals, the Croix
de Guerre and the military medal, and one had a chaplet that I had to
hide under the photograph of an old woman in her best bonnet. "Number
9," says Madame Bayle, "Number 16, Number 8," and dumps the poor little
handfuls of things into my apron.
"All your things are here," I say to the men, "look, Monsieur 8, I
have put them so on the table. I will move the table to the other side
because of your arm. Little Alpin, here is your béret hung on the knob
at the top of the bed, waiting for you to go out into Paris. And you,
my little one, here are your two medals, I pin them to the edge of your
chart. How proud you must be!"
But he does not care at all. He is a little young child, of the class
16. He has a round, boy face and big, round, blue eyes like a child's.
He only wants to lie with his eyes shut. He is the number 3. His right
leg is amputated, and his left foot is in plaster.
They are all men from Verdun, wounded eight or fifteen days ago, who
have been moved from one to another hospital of the Front. They do not
want to talk about it. They want to just lie still with their eyes
closed--except the one who screams, the 24.
The 24 screams and screams. He also has had a leg amputated. He is
perhaps twenty years old. He is a big blonde boy. He clutches the bars
of the top of the bed with his two hands, and drags all his rigid
weight upon his hands, and screams, with wide-open eyes that stare and
stare.
Also the man wounded in the head, the Number 6, lies with his eyes wide
staring open and like glass. He has a colonial medal that I do not
know, and the Croix de Guerre. They do not yet know if he can speak
or not. Madame Marthe told me while she was washing her hands at the
chariot that he may live quite long.
She said, "The chief is coming to see the wounds, we must cut all the
dressings. Take your scissors, and begin to the right of the door."
The Chéchia, Monday, May 15th
I suppose because to-day the sunshine is happy, Charles, the little 11,
who has been in his bed in the corner since the days of the Marne, has
taken a fancy to have all his things got ready for him in case he wants
to go out. He says that any day now he may be wanting to go out.
He is of the ler Zouaves, and it is a red cap he must have, a chéchia.
Nobody knows what became of his, it is so long since he had worn it.
He never thought of it himself until to-day. But to-day he thinks of
nothing else.
Number 10 and Number 12--new these last days--say he waked them up
talking about it. When Madame Marthe came on at six o'clock he beckoned
to her at the door, and when she came, he whispered--did she think he
might ask the American for it?
He was very red when he asked me, and then very white, and his hands
clasped and unclasped.
Did I think I could have it to-morrow? Did I think I could have it this
afternoon? And did I think that possibly, possibly I could get a tassel
for it: a big lavender tassel that would hang down all at one side.
Monday, May 29th
I went this afternoon to the Pré Catelan, for the first time in very
long. I went in by the gate near the stone column.
There were quite a lot of motors waiting at the gate; it did not look
war as it did last year. Last year, in May, the gates were always
almost shut, and when people came they had to push through. Last year
the little park was very empty. We used to wander as we pleased across
the lawns and gather primroses that grew for nobody. But now there were
people in the paths; especially Nounou with her broad ribbons and her
campstool, and the baby, and Monsieur l'Abbé, playing blind man's buff
with the bigger children.
Green lawns, bright as live green fire, the trees all in delicate
misty leaf, light greens and dark greens and copper and amber and gold,
filmy and drifting, as veils, about the trunks and boughs and branches.
The flower-beds were full of hyacinths and forget-me-nots.
Never, never, surely has spring meant so much as in these two years of
war.
All the birds of spring were singing. All of them. The grass of the
lawns was full of little starry pink and white daisies.
By the little watercourse there was a bank of blue flowers. They were
reflected in the water, very, very blue. I do not know what they were.
They were of a much more intense blue than the myosotis. I did not go
to see what they were; I thought they might be the blue flowers of
happiness, and that it was better I did not go too near.
The hideous, huge restaurant is a hospital. The paths and the road to
it, and the lawns and garden beds about it are corded off that people
may not go and look. From the distance, you see vague, white shapes
of things, and figures all in white, moving about inside the great
plateglass windows!
What wonderful people used to sit at the tables, in those windows!
What is there now on the raised platform of the music? The music used
to be so gay. Did people ever really dance there?
How queer pain and grief seem to be, in this place that they have taken
over. Was this really ever a place so gay and brilliant, that no other
place of the world symbolized quite as fragile a thing?
Thursday, June 1st
Verdun, Verdun, Verdun. The great bells, that are not really bells, are
still ringing and ringing. One hears them ringing through the streets
of Paris, up and down, all night long. Out in the country they must be
ringing, and ringing across all the fields and forests, and through the
hills, and along all the roads and rivers, and to all the edges of the
land.
Even if they were dirges, tolling, they would yet always have been
triumphant bells.
The Queen: To her
A beautiful thing has happened in a beautiful hospital. Going to that
hospital from mine, what seems most beautiful about it, and very
strange, is its peace. It is so quiet. The little gentle nuns move
softly and have sweet low voices. The women who work there are all of
them women who choose to serve, and they serve lovingly. One feels
there quietness and sympathy, and something that I think must be just
the love of God. My hospital seems like a nightmare in that beautiful
place.
One day there came to visit that beautiful hospital a very gentle lady,
than whose story there is none more tragic in the whole world.
She is a queen who lives in exile. She has known every sorrow that a
woman can know, and that a queen can know, every one. And she lives,
with the memory of her sorrows, in exile.
She may come to France at times for visits of which few people are
aware; and those are the times that are most nearly happy for her, for
she loves France, and the France that knows her, that is so truly her
own, loves her greatly.
The little soldiers of France might have been her soldiers. If they
realized, how they would love to be her soldiers! What would it not
mean to them to have such a queen to fight for?
The soldiers in the beautiful hospital were not told at first that it
was a queen who came that day to see them. They only knew that it was a
very lovely lady. She understood just how to talk to them, just how to
look at them. They were men who had given everything they had to give
for the country that she loved, that was indeed her country, and she
loved them, every one of them, and her love for them was in her eyes
and on her lips and in her voice. She had known so much of suffering
that she could take the suffering of each man for her own to bear with
him.
There was a man who was dying. He was not a beautiful young boy, but
one of those older little soldiers who touch one's heart so. The thin,
worn, stooping little soldier type who has his wife and the children
and the old people to be anxious about while he serves his France. The
bearded, anxious-eyed little soldier type who knows just what it all
means, and who has the flame of the spirit of France shining in his
always rather haggard eyes.
This little soldier was dying; there was no hope at all. He knew
quite well. His wife and babies were far away and could not come to
him. And he was glad of that, he wanted his wife to be spared all she
might be spared of pain. He was glad she would not have to remember
his suffering so. The nurse had promised to tell his wife always that
he had not suffered at all. His nurse had promised him that she would
always keep sight of his wife and the babies, and be sure that no harm
came to the old people. She had comforted him in everything. And she,
and the good little sisters, had so beautiful a faith in God, that he
was sure they knew, and that it all would be quite well.
He had won his Croix de Guerre and Médaille Militaire; they had been
sent, but the officer had not yet come from the President of the
Republic to give them to him. It seemed very sad to the people of the
hospital that his medals should not be given to him before he died. His
nurse had been very troubled about it, and the chief doctor also. They
had sent messages twice to the authorities, but no one had come.
Then, when the queen was there the nurse who herself was a great lady
of the world, thought of a beautiful thing and asked the chief doctor
if it could not be. That the queen should give his decorations to the
man who was dying, and that they should tell him, and all the others,
that it was the queen. She knew what pleasure it would give him. She
knew it would be like a dream to him, a lovely dream thing to happen to
him, just at the end. Of course, it would not be official, but what did
that signify--now? The man was dying.
The doctor and the queen spoke together for a minute.
The queen had never cried for her own sorrows, but she had tears in her
eyes then, and did not mind that every one saw.
When all of those people of the hospital who could come were assembled
in the ward, the hospital staff, and all of the wounded who could walk
or be carried, the doctor told them, very simply, his voice a little
hoarse, that it was the Queen of ---- who was there among them, and
that she was going to give his decorations to their comrade. A thrill
passed through all the ward as the doctor's voice dropped into silence.
No one spoke at all.
The little soldier who was to be so honoured turned his head and looked
at the queen.
She was crying very much, but she smiled, and said to him, "You see, my
little one, I cry because it is so great an honour for me that I may
give his decorations to a soldier of France." She would not have him
know that she cried because he was dying. She smiled down at him.
Then she took his papers from the doctor and read his citations out
aloud, quite steadily, to all the ward.
She bent down over him and pinned the two medals on his poor
nightshirt. "The honour is all mine," she said.
And then she took his head between her hands, as if he had been a
child--as if he had been her own son who was so cruelly dead--and
kissed his forehead.
They say that royalty must go away out of the world. But how can
any one say that who knows beautiful things? There is something so
beautiful that belongs only to kingship, something of ideal and dream.
It was there, in the hospital ward, when the great lady in the plain,
almost poor, dress, her eyes full of tears, was honoured by the honour
she might do a little soldier. Only a queen could have made it all
seem so beautiful. Only a queen could have kissed a little soldier of
the people, who really were her people, so quite as if he had been her
child, or have made of kneeling by his bed for a minute quite so simple
and proud and symbolic a thing.
The little soldier never said one word. His eyes followed her with the
worship that is quite different from any other worship, the worship
that can be given only to a queen.
Afterwards he said to his nurse--it was the only time he spoke, for in
that night he died--"You will tell my wife, will you not? You will tell
her all about my queen?"
Questions and Answers
The wounds in the road are kept filled up. As the road is wounded,
every day, they fill the wounds up and smooth them over. Because, in
case of an advance or a retreat, the way must be kept open and clear.
This I have been told, for I cannot go to see.
They tell me how the work of the fields goes on around the wounds of
the fields. There is no need, of course, to tend the wounds of the
fields. Sometimes in the ploughing the blade of the plough strikes
against an unexploded shell that the grass had hidden, and the old
horse is killed, or the yoke of oxen, and the old peasant.