Sometimes the soldiers, back at repose, help with the work of the

fields.

I ask, are the larks singing over the fields? But, of course. And are

there magpies in the road? Why, yes.

When a shell bursts in the fields, they say, it is scarcely frightful

at all, the spaces are so wide. It seems far from you, and you think of

it as just something of the world's--scream of wind, lightning, that

strikes perhaps; not an enemy thing at all.

Do the bees drone on just the same in the clover? They say they are

absurd things that I want to know.

But I think of the clover growing tall and sweet about the little

tilted wooden crosses, of which the fields are so full; and of the bees

droning their golden, sleepy song, there, like that.

The Dead Town

They say that the grass is growing everywhere in the empty streets of

the town. The streets are kept cleared of the ruins of the houses that

fall into them, and their wounds are carefully healed, like the wounds

of the road. The stones of the broken houses are piled up quite neatly

at the edge of the streets. There is no glass left of the windows of

those houses that still stand--except for that--unhurt. Many of the

houses are terribly hurt, the roof gone, great gaps in the walls.

I ask, do you see the paper of the walls in broken rooms? Are there

pretty little wall-papers, with flowers and ribbons, that you see

through the wounds of the houses? Are there left rags of curtain,

tattered and rain-washed and faded, in some of the windows? Do you see

people's little loved things, abandoned in the broken ruins, betrayed

to strangers?

They tell me that vines are grown across to bar the doors so long

unopened, or the doors left so long open, sagging; and I suppose that

there are cobwebs also.

They say that here and there you see a sign scrawled up over a door, or

over the break in a wall, that says, "En cas de bombardement il y a ici

une cave."

I ask, is the signboard of Monsieur Pigot's, the pastrycook, still hung

out over his door?

The Grass Road

You can keep on for a short distance beyond the town, on the other side

of it. The great road leads on between its poplar trees, white and

straight. Here it has been less wounded because the hills shelter it.

The trees have not been hurt here; they lift their grey-green plumes,

light and proud as ever, above the road.

I remember to ask: Is there much passing along the road, that terrible

grey passing of war things? Do you see many blue troops along the road?

They say: Oh, yes, of course, as far as the old octroi.

What is it like now at the octroi under the edge of the hill?

Just beyond the octroi there is a barbed-wire entanglement across the

road. No one can go farther. There are soldiers in the yellow little

house of the octroi. The sentinel comes out.

They tell me that the road beyond the barbed-wire entanglement leads

straight on, between the poplar trees, as far as any one can see, deep

grown in grass. Nearly two years deep in grass. It is nearly two years

since any one, yes, any one, has gone a step along that road.

They tell me a thing the sentinel said, that is a hideous thing. I

do not know why I want to tell it. I know just how he said it, with

bitterness and irony, but as if it were a thing of small matter that

would be soon arranged for.

He said, "Just along there, about half-way as far as we can see, begins

Germany."

Fifteen Days

Just before the end of the world they were together at the château.

They thought it was to have been for the last time. There had been

many things they needed to talk over and arrange together, and why not

quietly. They were "done with passion, pain, and anger." They thought

to bid one another good-bye when everything was arranged, wishing one

another well, and go their different ways.

There were no children, they were hurting no one. They had been hurting

one another too long, for ten years--they were both still so young that

it seemed to them half a lifetime--and now they thought they would

never hurt one another any more. It was an immense relief to each of

them to feel that it was over, quite over, dead and done with. But it

was not over.

From the first moment of talk of war his one idea was to get himself

taken for the army. When he was a boy, a fall in hunting had hurt his

spine seriously; he had never been able to do his military service. The

trouble had grown worse, and now, with his crooked back and halting

step, there was nothing, exactly nothing, it seemed, he could do.

She stayed with him through those days of the utmost nervous tension.

How could she leave him then? She understood him so well in his

moods, now in despair, now hopeful, now in despair again; disgraced,

he would say, worthless, ashamed before his peasants, before the

castle servants, who were, all of them, going to join the colours;

angry against everything, he had such need of her to tell it all to.

He exhausted himself with hurried, futile journeys hither and yonder

to find some one whose influence might get him "taken." He spent his

nights walking the wide floors up and down, and writing letters to

people he thought might "do something." But none of it was of any use.

He worried himself ill. He fainted twice in one day, the day the papers

told of the taking of the first German flag. It was a flaming white hot

day in their country of the Aisne.

There were days of the passing through of their own troops. For days

the valley was one deep, endlessly drawn-out trail of dust, from which

came unceasingly the turmoil of hoofs and wheels and men's shouting,

the horns and rush of motors, bugle-calls, the hot beating of drums.

Night after night the village took in the men billeted upon it, lodged

them somehow, fed them somehow. The château received the officers, and

did what it could for them.

Those were days of great enthusiasm. Trains passed full of flowers,

of men laughing and singing. Trainloads of great dust-coloured cannon

passed, covered with flowers.

Claire started a canteen at the station, the little country station by

the river, in the fields of August wheat and poppies.

Those were exalted, wonderful days for her. She knew how agonizing they

were for Rémy, and she felt about him very tenderly.

She was a beautiful, strong creature, her beauty and strength for years

now had annoyed and been a grievance to him. But now he seemed to have

need of her strength and quietness. She pitied him for what she meant

to him in those days.

But when bad news came, everything changed for him.

There were so many things for him to do. He was maire of the

village--the village counted on him, he was not useless any more. He

had been really ill with grieving, but now that he was of use, he was

as well as she had ever seen him before. All his small nervous ways

fell from him; she did not understand him any more than if he had been

a child grown up suddenly beyond her; but she was immensely pleased

with him. She was so glad to be able to feel him stronger than she. It

was very good to be able to turn to him now for help and comfort.

Her canteen at the station served trains that were full of wounded.

Some of the wounded were so bad that they had to be taken out of

the trains. She got a hospital arranged as well as she could in the

château. For days it was so full that the wounded and dying lay on beds

of straw on the floor of the great salons, not a scrap of linen in the

château but was used for dressings and bandages.

Then the refugees from the villages of the north and the east began to

pour through, telling of ghastly things. And then came the troops in

retreat.

The hospital had to be evacuated in dreadful haste. It was more

dreadful than anything she had ever imagined. There was a day when the

old town-crier went through the streets, beating a drum, and calling

out the warning to evacuate. All the people who could do so fled. They

fled, and left everything they possessed behind them.

It was said that when the troops were passed, the bridge at the bend of

the river must be blown up after them, and so the village would be cut

off and left to the enemy.

Rémy made the villagers give him the keys of their houses, and he put

up a notice in the Grand' Place that any one wishing to enter the

houses must apply for the keys to the château; he wrote the notice in

German.

Claire was proud that he did not suggest that she should go away, that

he took for granted she was at least as strong as he.

The explosion of the blowing up of the old bridge was like the final

note of all the things that used to be. The dust of the valley settled

down for an hour, and things seemed strangely quiet.

All the people of the village who had not been able to get away came

to the château, the very old people and the sick, and some women with

babies, begging shelter for the night.

Three wounded men, whom it had been impossible to remove, were left

behind in the great Salle des Miroirs. Claire was with them all night.

The curé had stayed, and the sage-femme of the village had also

remained to help her; the doctor and the chemist were both fled.

One of the men died in the night.

Another, who was delirious, kept singing all the time, "Auprès de ma

Blonde."

It frightened Claire. There was a moment when she was uncontrollably

afraid. She was afraid, not of the things that were coming to pass,

but with a nightmare panic of the wounded man, singing, "Auprès de ma

Blonde."

She could not bear it. She rushed in desperate panic to find Rémy.

It was in the moment before dawn; the birds in the garden and park

were waking; the halls and stairs were still dark. She thought she

never would find him; then she thought he must be in the kitchen, where

the village people were huddled together.

She found him there, talking to them quietly.

There was a girl who had St. Vitus dance; she sat by the big kitchen

table, one of her hands, that would not keep still, thumping and

thumping the table. Claire was afraid to go into the kitchen.

Rémy came out into the passage to her, and shut the kitchen door behind

him.

The lamp was still burning in the passage.

She caught his hands; and suddenly she had buried her face in his

shoulder and was crying.

"There, there," he said, patting her hair.

She sobbed, clinging to him.

"You have been so brave," he said, "poor child."

She could have cried for a long time with his arms around her.

But he said, "You must not let them find you like this, you know; they

might think you were afraid."

They came, very shortly after.

There was a galloping of hoofs into the château courts, and a shouting.

Then came the mass of them, surging into the court, greenish-yellow,

with their loud, snarling voices.

Claire saw them from the windows over the court; Rémy had gone down to

meet them.

She came down to the great central hall, not afraid any more. She had

dressed carefully, and arranged her hair specially well. Tall and fine,

she came slowly down the curving staircase, and stopped half-way to

look on what was passing below.

The German officers seemed to her to be all gigantic creatures; Rémy

looked more than ever small and frail among them. They were commanding,

this way and that, roughly. Rémy stood silent, watching them. His look

was so high and cool, so proud in the bitterness of the moment, that

she drew herself up with pride in him.

The colonel was speaking with him, and moved toward the door of the

Salle des Miroirs. Rémy stepped before him. "Not there," he said, "two

men are dying in that room."

Claire came down into the hall and crossed between the officers and

went to stand beside her husband. She was very proud to stand beside

him. Something in her bearing seemed to carry weight with the officers;

they drew back, less insistent before her, from the door of the Salle

des Miroirs.

Again and again, in the fifteen days that followed, she felt that same

effect of her presence upon them, and knew that it was a help to Rémy.

In the fifteen days he and she had opportunity for very few words

together, the Germans always watching them suspiciously.

All the days were full of confusion; Rémy was kept constantly about

with the German officers to arrange for the billeting of the men in the

village, the stabling of horses and motors, interpreting, explaining.

No one but he could get the frightened people, the few there were of

them remaining, to go back to their houses and do the things required

of them. No one but he could protect them, and at the same time see to

it that they gave no offence. The least rousing of the Germans' anger

would, he knew, have to be paid for dreadfully. Their demands were made

at the point of the bayonet. They were angry because the bridge had

been destroyed, and only Rémy's cool, quiet strength of insistence kept

them from carrying out the threat to burn the village in reprisal. To

hold his own, the while obeying as he must obey, yielding this point

and that, submitting, and yet faithfully defending all that depended

on him, was no easy matter of accomplishment. He must keep faith and

dignity, and yet he must not give offence.

There were very desperate moments when the Germans would be asking

for information, about the telephones and telegraphs, and about the

country, the roads, and the marble quarries, the rebuilding of the

bridge. Such help he could not give them, and there were moments when

his refusal to talk, like his refusal to take a cigarette, risked

everything.

Claire came to have a special dread of the colonel's fat leather

cigarette-case. Rémy must wave it aside saying, so that his meaning was

quite clear and yet courteous, that he had given up smoking for the

time. The little scene of it was repeated night after night.

At first the Germans would have him always stand up in their presence.

They would send for him while they dined, and have him stand there

while they questioned and commanded. Then they realized that it was his

wish to stand, that few things would have been more hateful for him

than to have sat down with them.

After that they would have him and Claire dine with them. They sent for

Claire to come down to the dining-room, where they were already seated

at table and Rémy was standing. She must sit on the colonel's right,

and drink a glass of champagne with him.

One of the officers called to her down the table, "There is yet left

many a toast we can drink together, the brave and the fair!"

She thought that Rémy's fury would get the better of him, and she spoke

quickly, before he could speak. She moved quickly between him and the

colonel.

The colonel, sitting at the head of the table, under the portraits of

generations of Rémy's people, glared up at her as she stood, very tall.

"You will do as I command you, madame," he said.

There seemed to be no escape. Desperately chancing it, she said, "But

you will not stoop to command so idly. You know that we have no help

but to obey you. Of what value could be forced obedience to you in so

petty a thing? I know you will not command a thing so trivial and poor."

And he did not ask it of them.

Her days as well as Rémy's were crowded. The Germans required so many

things, and there was no one left to serve them. She had only a few

peasant servants to help her. The Germans demanded food, and there

was scarcely anything to give them. Very little could be got in the

emptied village; there was no more meat or bread. These people must

eat, or they would become ugly. She must manage it somehow. She had

to get the bakery started again, and make the villagers understand

that they must give what they had in their little gardens, and their

chickens and the rabbits. Old Jantot at the castle was quite unable to

do the work of the kitchen-gardens and dairies. She worked hard helping

him.

All the day of the arrival of the Germans she had been pitching hay

from the stable loft to make bedding for the men quartered there; she

scarcely left her work that day, except to go to the funeral of the

soldier who had died in the Salle des Miroirs.

The curé helped old Jantot to carry him, and she followed them out

through the courts, and past the German guard.

The two other wounded men in the Salle des Miroirs died while the

strange alien life of the château went on. Three or four people of the

village were ill; one woman and her newly born child died; there was no

one but Claire to help the sage-femme.

The Germans accused the old curé of signalling from the church tower.

They took him into the market-place, with a rope tied round his neck,

to hang him, they said, under the plane-tree by the fountain. Rémy

stood by him, risking everything to make them delay a few minutes.

Claire found the colonel; she never could remember what she said,

how she pleaded. But the colonel said, "If we find these things true

against him, then it will be your husband who will hang for it."

In one of the rare moments when they were alone together, Rémy said

something which gave her more pleasure to hear than anything that had

ever been told her before. He told her that but for her he did not

think he could possibly endure it, that only her presence there, so

brave and strong, the one thing left in the world, gave him strength to

go on.

He had come up to her room, a small tower room she had withdrawn to

when the Germans arrived. It was late in the evening, the room was

almost dark, and she had lighted two candles on the little table, by

the window, where she was having bread and soup on a tray. He had had

scarcely anything to eat all day, and she made him share the soup and

the bread. They laughed because he was really hungry. Cut off from

the world, completely alone together in the most intense isolation,

having no one, nothing, left, either of them, but each the other, in a

world terrible beyond belief, they laughed together because he was so

absurdly hungry.

They knew nothing but what the Germans told them of things that were

happening in the world.

How could they believe such things? They did not believe, and yet to

hear them said!

Fifteen days passed, that they could not have lived through if there

had not been so much for them to do in every moment, and if they had

not had each of them the comfort and support of the other's presence.

Fifteen days passed, of helplessness and dread, almost despair.

Then, in one day, something was changed for the Germans; there was no

knowing what it was; their mood took on a new ugliness.

It was that day that some of the men hanged Claire's St. Bernard puppy.

They hanged him on the terrace from the branch of the big chestnut tree

and left him there. Claire came up through the park from the village

and found him. They never knew why the men had done it; it seemed so

small and useless a thing to have done.

For two days she and Rémy were kept as prisoners, allowed to leave

their rooms only attended by a soldier, and not to go to the village at

all. There seemed to be a great confusion and commotion in the village

and in the castle, but no explanation was given them.

Then, in one night, the Germans were gone.

Village and castle were left empty for scarcely a morning, and then

came French troops, in hot pursuit from the victory of the Marne.

From the victory of the Marne--there had been a victory, a great

victory! What a thing to hear, after their almost hopeless days!

Hopelessness had been so black and close about them. And now it was

lifted, dispersed, in a moment, by a word. Here come their own people

crying victory. In their own tongue, their own men, dressed in blue,

told them of victory.

Those things the Germans had said were not true. They had never

believed, but now they knew. To think of looking into the faces of

friends, of talking with friends! The humblest little soldier was a

friend, the most wonderful of all things.

Rémy, who had all his life been distant and cold, was inexpressibly

happy to wring a friend's hand, and sit with him, or pace the floor

with him, and smoke with him.

What a pleasure to give all one had to friends!

How happy Claire was to help scrub and cook for friends!

It was a madness of relief and joy.

There was little time for thinking about it though. The new possession

of the château was a desperately risky thing.

But these were friends, to suffer with and die with, if need be.

Nothing could be as terrible as in those past days of isolation among

enemies. Among friends they met what came.

In a few hours death and destruction were upon everything. And then,

day after day, day after day, the battle raged along the river and

under the edge of the hills; the sound of the cannon grew to be a

familiar part of the nights and days; the screech of a shell was no

longer strange.

The Germans had withdrawn to the strongholds of the marble quarries,

just above the village. The village was crossed by the two fires. The

poor people were killed in their little houses.

Men who went up on the château roofs to reconnoitre, were brought back

dead. An officer was killed by a shell on the terrace, under the big

chestnut tree.

Claire had to leave her tower room, and next day it had fallen with

all the roofs of the east wing of the castle. Two men were killed in

the fall of the east wing roofs, and the chestnut tree of the terrace,

that had shaded generations of pleasant dreaming, was struck down under

falling of tiles and stone.

They established the staff of the Etat-Major for greater safety in the

cellars.

More than half the village was destroyed in those days. Claire and her

husband lodged the homeless people as best they could in the dairy, the

ground floor of the château was already crowded with the officers, and

the stables and farm-buildings with the men.

For Rémy and Claire there was left one room, not too exposed, on the

first floor.

From the window of it, together, one night, they watched the burning

of a village over across the valley. It was a village of nearly all

thatched roofs: it must have caught fire from the shells, and in that

one night it was burnt to the ground.

As she and Rémy stood in the window, with nothing left about them but

ruin and death, she remembered how, just before all this, they had

thought they were come to the end of their life together; they had

thought they were nothing to one another any more. And then suddenly

they had come to be everything to each other. How could they either of

them have borne it without the other?

Now their intense, their desperate solitude, together, was at an end.

Others had come to share with them the burden of these things. There

were others to whom they could turn now for comradeship. All of it was

horrible, but now the world was again about them, life was opening its

ways again.

She wondered, standing there by him, if, when some day the dreadful

sounds of war were ceased and there was given them a chance to take

up what they might of life again and go on with it--would they go on

with it together? She wondered if he knew of what she was thinking as

they stood there side by side? They had now become used to feeling one

another's thoughts.

She was thinking that surely, after this, whatever happened they would

have to go on with it together? They had gone through too much together

ever again to break away. She would not have it otherwise, oh, not for

all the world would she have had it otherwise. But she was wondering,

if the great need passed, and life became small again, would they

be changed enough? Would all this they had gone through have given

them greatness enough to face, down length of days, the little things

together?

Hospital, Monday, June 12th

We never see them well. As soon as they are better at all they send

them downstairs to the convalescent ward, and from there they are

marked for other hospitals, and in a day or two, one morning, I come to

find them gone. The men who were evacuated at the beginning of Verdun

did not even make the halt of the ward downstairs. And now those first

Verdun men are gone, all but the very worst of them, to make place for

men from, we don't know where.

The boy with the almond-shaped eyes is one of those who are left.

He was much better for days, and now he has gone down again. He is

tuberculous, and that is why he never will get well. He lies sunk down

in the bed, a very small heap with closed eyes and one cheek always

bright red. His father and mother have come up from the country, from

somewhere in Normandy; they sit together beside his bed and look at

him. His mother wears a dress of the richest black silk, that must

have been the gala dress of her family for two or three generations,

and a cap of lace that the smartest lady in Paris would be proud of.

His father wears a black satin Sunday smock, of which the yoke is

embroidered wonderfully. They have dressed themselves in their very

best to come and sit by their boy, who scarcely notices them.

I like to think how happily the new Number 4--we call them all new

since Verdun began--went off, with his one leg. He will have a

wooden stick leg and be able to get about splendidly in his meadows

of the High Loire. To-day he showed me a little photograph of his

wife, in close-bound muslin cap and folded neckerchief. Her face is

like the face of the Madonna in the simple calm pure paintings of the

old masters. I said, "She is perfectly beautiful." He said, "Oh, no,

madame, she is only a peasant, and not young. It is not even a good

photograph. And it is all cracked and rubbed, madame sees, because I

have worn it all the time of the war, sewn in my coat."

Little Charles is always left--poor little Charles, well used to the

confusion of departures and arrivals.

As I was leaving to-day at noon, the mother and father of the boy with

the almond-shaped eyes got up from beside his bed and stopped me. The

father, who has almond-shaped eyes too, asked if they might have a word

with me when no one could hear. Their gala finery made them the more

pathetic, confused, and timid, strangers in such strange times and

place.

We went out into the corridor, the three of us, and stood by the door

of Madame Bayle's linen-room.

The father asked me, whispering, if I thought that the people of the

hospital were fond of the boy? He said that he and the mother were

obliged to go back that night to the farm, and did I think that these

people they must leave their boy with were fond of him?

Saturday, June 24th

The boy with the almond-shaped eyes is dead. He died day before

yesterday. I have been ill and not at the hospital these days, and I

did not know. I went back to the hospital only this afternoon.

His father and mother arrived too late, this morning. They had had

scarcely time to reach the farm in Normandy, when one of the house

doctors, a kind man, wrote to tell them to come back. At the bureau

they made a mistake in the address they gave the doctor, and his letter

was returned to him in the post the day before the boy died. The doctor

telegraphed then, but it was too late.

I do not know who told the father and mother when they came this

morning. I do not know where they are to-day--this day so terrible

for them in the great strange city. I would have liked to find them.

Madame Marthe says they were surely allowed to go and see their boy,

where he is, but not to stay with him.

I think of them, peasant people, confused and strange in city streets,

frightened, belonging to no one, terribly alone, with nowhere to go in

their grief. Where are they gone in their grief? They, to whom nothing

has ever been explained, who are so unable to tell or to ask.

Sunday, June 25th

I was going to the chapel with my flowers, but I met Madame Marthe in

the archway of our court, and she told me it was not there that I would

find him. We went together around behind the chapel and past buildings

that I had never seen before, of the immense world of the hospital.

What a dreadful world in this June sunshiny morning!

A steep, dusty road goes up past outbuildings of the hospital,

workshops, and yards, where there were some green things growing, and

at the top there were a lot of our soldiers waiting at the door of a

low, long house. My poor little hobbling, lopsided blue soldiers, with

their bandages and slings and canes and crutches! I think they are so

beautiful.

The doors of the house were open. Up two steps, and there were the

father and mother, in their black silk and satin, standing beside the

boy. They were perfectly quiet. The strange thing about the grief one

sees in these days, everywhere, is that always it is so perfectly

quiet. The boy looked just as one had seen him so often, sleeping, with

his almond eyes closed. Only there was no fever in his cheeks any more.

The black hearse came up the road with several croquemorts and eight

Republican Guards; they had two crossed palms for the boy, and the flag

to cover him, and the black wooden cross that was to mark his grave.

We followed down the road and across the courts and out of the hospital

gates.

The Sunday morning market was busy and noisy outside in the street,

but a silence seemed to form itself around us as we went between the

barrows and booths of summer country things. Then we went along a wide

avenue that was empty, where the sound of the wheels of the hearse and

of the horses' hoofs seemed solemn and monotonous, and as if it were

something that never would cease. The boy's father and mother trudged

ahead sturdily, with the strong gait of peasants from the fields, and

my wounded dragged along, already tired. It was a long way from the

hospital to the church.

There were many people in the street of the church, and on the church

steps, and the church inside was crowded. It is the church of an

irreligious quarter, but it was crowded.

A big Suisse with his mace led us along the aisle, through the throng

of people who stood back from us, to the chapel of Our Lady, behind the

high altar. Many of the Suisses of the churches of this quarter are

gendarmes, needed because the roughs who come into the church would

often make disturbance. The big Suisse had the air of a gendarme,

ordering us.

But now the boy's mother and father were in a place they understood.

There was no need to order them. They knew just what to do. They had

been uncertain elsewhere, timid and bewildered, in the hospital, in the

streets, but in the church they were at home.

The boy's mother motioned me into a chair behind hers. She and I were

the only women: Madame Marthe had had to go back to her work in the

ward. I knelt where she told me to kneel. The boy's father helped the

wounded into the chairs across the chapel aisle from us, and took his

place in front of them. In the aisle, between his father and mother,

the boy had his four lighted tapers and his crossed palms and the flag

of his country.

The priest who said the office was old, and fumbled and murmured. I was

glad that he was slow. It gave a longer time for the father and mother

to rest and be comforted.

The Suisse was rather in a hurry at the end of it, perhaps there was

another funeral waiting. He would have had us follow the priest out

quickly.

But the boy's mother would stop to kneel by the boy for a little

moment, there before the altar of the Blessed Virgin. The boy's father

came and knelt also, on the floor of the aisle.

Two calm figures, they knelt there, the Suisse could not hurry them.

Those who would have carried their boy away stood and waited. We stood

back and waited. The stir up and down of people outside the chapel

gates went on, and all the stirs of the church and the streets and the

world.

The two calm figures knelt, for the moment they were, with their

sorrow, at peace; not strangers here, but at home in the house of that

which did not confuse or frighten them.

The Stain

The maid, who had been Giselle's nurse so short a time ago, opened the

library door and announced, unwillingly, one could see, "Madame la

Marquise de St. Agnan, Madame la Comtesse."

Giselle, in her heavy mourning, stood up from the chair by the window.

She did not go forward to meet Paule.

"It is sweet of you to see me," said Paule, crossing the room to her,

slender and tall and lovely.

The baby-boy and girl who had been playing with some wooden toy

soldiers on the floor in a corner, both scrambled up and trotted over

to their mother.

Paule had never seen them before. She wanted to take them both in her

arms and hold them tight. She thought she could never have let the boy

go.

But Giselle said to the maid, "Honorine, please take the children to

Miss."

They went out with the old woman, who closed the door.

"It was very sweet of you to let me come," repeated Paule, because she

had to say something. It was harder than she had thought possible.

"I have seen no one at all," said Giselle. "But your letter--I don't

know--I wondered----"

They stood looking at one another. Of course, they did not touch one

another's hands.

Suddenly the room seemed to swim about Paule, there was a surging in

her ears. She said, "May I sit down?"

"But I beg you! I am sorry, I can't seem to think of things. Here in

the window?"

Paule dragged the chair out of the light of the sunshiny June morning

into the shadow of the curtain. She was wearing a heavy white lace

veil, but she did not want to face the sunshine.

Giselle threw herself into the chair where she had been sitting before.

Her crape and the traces of many tears upon her face only made her look

the more pathetically young.

"You wondered," said Paule, "if my letter were true, really; if it were

possible that I could honestly write like that of him?"

Giselle nodded her head, not speaking.

Paule saw that it would not have been possible for her to speak. She

saw, what she had been sure she would see, that the younger woman was

suffering intensely. She realized, more than ever what the thing meant

to her Bernard's wife; how for her everything of her memory of him, the

memory she was to keep with her all her life, depended on what she

was to learn in this hour. All the memory she was to keep of her dead

husband depended on it. That she might remember him with tenderness

and solace and peace; or that it must be always with uncertainty and

restlessness, and bitter thoughts. To be able to mourn him fully,

fearlessly; or to go on always tormenting herself with doubt. It was of

desperate importance to her. Paule saw that. She knew that the younger

woman kept silent because she could not speak, not because of any

realization she had of the advantage silence gave her.

Giselle, silent, waited.

The older woman, braving the silence, took the thing up.

"You are going to believe what I tell you. I don't know why you should

believe me, but you will. They all talk of it, but I am the only one

who really knows. And I have got to tell you. The things they say

are true, but with such a difference. I must make you understand the

difference. Since the moment Dolly told me that you knew, I have known

that I must make you understand. I cannot let you misunderstand him

when he is dead."

She was holding her parasol across her knees, her hands in their soft

tan gloves clutching the two ends of it very tight.

"It is rather terribly hard for me to tell you," she said, "harder

even than for you to listen. Remember that, if I seem to go over it

cruelly." She stopped, and Giselle nodded again.

"I must go over it," Paule went on, speaking very fast now, "so that we

can have it all clear between us. Don't you see? He came home here for

six days' leave. He told you he had six days' leave. When he went, at

the end of those six days, you thought it was back to the front he was

gone. Then, _three days after he left you_, he was killed in a bayonet

charge. And his colonel, and some of his friends, said, writing to you

and to other people of him, that it was especially sad to think he had

been killed the _very day he came back from his leave_. So you knew

that his leave had been of eight days, that he had had two days' extra

leave of which he had not told you, spent, you did not know where, or

with whom. And then it happened Dolly spoke to you of seeing him with

me in Evreux the _very_ day before he was killed. And so you knew. She

had spoken of it to lots of people--the way people always say, you

know, 'and I saw him only the day before.' And so every one knew. And

you knew. But I have got to make you understand."

She let go her parasol and, leaning forward into the sunshine, threw

her veil back from her face with her two hands. "I will let you see how

I have suffered," she said, "it is written for you in my face." She was

glad to have the younger woman see how much of her beauty was gone.

"And that I loved him. You know--I must let you know--that I loved him.

I loved him when you were a little schoolroom girl. And he did love

me then." She drew herself up with a sudden flaming of pride. "I will

give myself the comfort of saying that he loved me before he knew you,

Giselle." The flame died down instantly, and she leaned forward, almost

beseechingly. The parasol had fallen to the floor. "But he never loved

me afterwards. From the moment he saw you--I was with him at somebody's

dance the first time he saw you--I knew that for me everything was

finished. Everything was swept away by his love of you. You know that,

don't you?"

"I believed it then," said Giselle, speaking at last, "then, and all

the time, in spite of all the things that people said, until this."

"There was one thing I never let go," Paule went on; "it was the

pitying, protecting tenderness a man who is good like Bernard always

continues to feel for the woman he once loved and who goes on loving

him. I kept that alive, I kept him being sorry for me. There's

reason enough in my life for any one to be sorry for me. And I kept

him feeling that he must protect me, protect me from the blackness of

sorrow that, I let him know always, there was in my heart."

Giselle had turned from her, as if she could not look at her, and sat

staring out of the window to the tops of the trees in the avenue. Her

cheeks were burning, as if the shame of the miserable confession were

her own.

"Do you not see, oh, do you not see?" begged the other woman.

There was a dreadful silence.

Paule took it up again. "And the last thing was the accumulation of the

shame and misery of years. I wish I could make you see, a little, what

it meant to me, that you might not quite despise me. I suppose there is

no excuse. But it had been so dreadful, down there in the country, with

my husband, as he is, you know, ill, needing me, hating me, wanting me

every moment. And all these terrible months of war, nearly two years,

never seeing Bernard, scarcely hearing of him. I made him come. I made

him come by telling him that I was in desperate trouble, that if he did

not come I could not face it. I told him he must tell no one, not even

you: that my trouble was a thing I must keep secret. Against his will,

just by abuse of his kindness I made him give me those two days. I want

you to quite, quite understand that it was only that I loved him, that

he loved you. And that those two days were my theft of time he wanted

to give all to you."

"Oh, don't, don't!" cried Giselle, breaking into it. "You need not tell

me any more." She covered her face with her hands, as if it were she

who was ashamed.

"Some day you will wonder why I have told you," Paule said, "why any

woman should so humiliate herself down to the dust. It is because

you have the right to a beautiful memory of him. You must keep that

beautiful memory of him for yourself and for his children. It belongs

to you, and to his home, and to his children. Never doubt him, Giselle,

and let your sorrow be a beautiful sorrow, because he loved you as you

loved him, perfectly. And in death he is yours. That is all."

She stopped and picked up her parasol. It was a green parasol. She

looked from its bright colour to Giselle's black dress. She shivered a

little and stood up.

Giselle took her hands away from her eyes and stood up, too.

Paule would have turned and gone out of the room, but Giselle caught

her hands and held her, and lifted up her young face from which the

tortured look was gone. She was crying, but tenderly.

For an instant it seemed as if Paule would have drawn away from her.

But then she bent from her lovely height and kissed the younger woman.

Then she went away.

Giselle did not go to the door with her. Old Honorine let her out of

the apartment.

She went down the stairs and out into the avenue, where the leaves of

the trees made large shadows.

As she walked very wearily, she did not know where, she was telling

herself that it was over, that she had done what she could. She had

made poor little Giselle believe her. She had given him to Giselle.

The avenue ahead of her seemed very, very long. She wondered if she

would ever get to the end of it. Her thoughts seemed confused. She

wondered what there was so cruel about Giselle's black dress and her

own green parasol with the parrot handle. She would manage somehow to

make the world believe that story she had told Giselle. She had given

him to Giselle to mourn for. Perhaps that would wipe out some of it.

From Verdun

He was grown so used to his mud-hole, and the straw, and the mushrooms,

and rats, that when he was come into the salon of the house in the Parc

Monceau, and the butler he never had seen before had closed the door

behind him saying, in odd French, that he would go and tell Madame la

Comtesse, he just stood there in the middle of the room and laughed.

He stood there, just as he had come out of the trenches, a most

disreputable figure that once had been blue, and laughed to think that

it was to this, all this, he really belonged. This was his house, and

his wife would be coming in a moment into the room.

The room smelled of sandal-wood and amber. Things in it were of black

lacquer and mauve velvet and dull gold. There were lots of books about

on low tables, and Dolly's gold and amber cigarette things, and white

roses, just the heads broken off, floating in flat bowls of smoky jade.

How like Dolly to have cut off the long stems of the roses and their

lovely thorns and leaves! He really must not laugh. There was one

flame-red vase with a white spirit orchid in it.

Then Dolly came in, as fragile and pale and lovely as the orchid. It

was ten months since he had seen her. How delightfully her hair was

done, and her fingers, rose-tipped like sea-shells! She came to him,

her flower-face lifted.

He said, "Oh, my dear, I am so dirty."

Some one had followed her into the room, a woman in deep mourning. It

was the little Juriac, Lisette de Juriac, and she was quite unchanged.

Not even her heavy crape changed her. How was it possible that she was

not changed? How could she still be beautiful?

She came forward saying, "I was here with Dolly; I could not go, and

not see you. I must stop just a moment to speak to you."

He took her hand and held it, and did not know what to say to her. He

was seeing again that which he had seen not six weeks ago. He had seen

many men die horribly, horribly. But if he thought too much of how his

friend, her husband, had died, kept too vividly, too long, seeing it,

he would go mad. Why was she not gone mad? She had loved her husband,

who had loved her. They had been happy together.

He had a sudden hatred of her because she was not gone mad. Because

there was some becoming white thing about her face to soften the

harshness of the crape, and because there were pearls around her

throat; he had a crazy desire to take her, his two hands clutching her

shoulders, and tell her how René died, tell her the horror, burnt,

burnt, burnt, make her see what he could not stop seeing. Because of

the white frill and the pearls, he wanted to make her see it and feel

it, and go down crushed under the realization of it. He would have made

her ugly, as suffering makes ugly. When she was ugly he would believe

she suffered. He could not move or speak, for he would have seized her

and told her.

She was saying, "You were with him in the attack, you saw him fall,

and you went back and tried to save him." She had her black gloves and

parasol in her hand, and a little black bag, soft, like the gloves. She

was trying to open the little black bag to get something out of it. She

was beginning to cry.

Dolly, saying, "Poor dear, poor dear," took the gloves and parasol from

her and found a scrap of a handkerchief for her in the bag. "Poor dear,

poor dear." She put her arm around Lisette and patted her eyes with the

tiny handkerchief. "Darling, it was a glorious death, you know, like

that, in action, beautiful, the death he would have chosen. Jacques,

tell her."

Tell her? He was trying not to tell her. He stood there looking at his

friend's wife and trying not to tell her of the hands that had moved

and moved, beating and beating the air.

"Tell her how fearless he was," Dolly was saying, "and how proud she

must be of him."

Oh, yes, there was that. He thought of the words they always use. He

said, "He died for his country."

She was crying only a little, but with really piteous tears. He knew

that after a while, when he was himself a little farther from it,

he would be sorry for her. Her dimpled chin quivered and her throat

throbbed under the pearls. She looked at him, her eyes big with tears,

and, half sobbing, said, "You were with him just before the attack, the

last to speak with him."

"Yes, we were together."

She was waiting for him to tell her something. But there was nothing

to tell her. He had again that other craziness. Now he was afraid that

he would laugh. They had been crouching behind a heap of dead men, in

the terrible dusk of cannon smoke and the noise that never ceased. He

remembered they had been eating something. There had risen a wild,

strange shriek through the noise of the cannon, and they had leaped up,

had shrieked, and been over the sandbags.

Lisette was waiting, and while he tried to think, she said, "Was he

speaking of me? Were his last words for me?"

"He was always thinking of you, I know, Lisette." That he could say

eagerly, intensely--only why need she have it put into words? "You were

his whole life, Lisette."

She lifted her head with a quite perfect gesture, and smiled, her eyes

bright, the tears gone from them. "I was his whole life," she said,

"and he died for his country." There was no more sob in her voice. She

said, "He was so young and splendid, and he had always been so happy.

He had so much to live for. He gave up so much with his life for his

country. He leaves such a beautiful memory. I can say, 'His life was

the woman who loved him, and for his country he died.' It is beautiful.

That is the only comfort of it all, that it is beautiful." She broke

off and began again, "I'm glad I saw you, Jacques, you have helped me,

I'm so unhappy." She put the little handkerchief back in the bag, and

took up her gloves and parasol. "Now I will leave you," she said. "Poor

boy, you must be too tired to talk. How wonderful for Dolly to have

you! Perhaps you will come with her to-morrow--they have persuaded me

to lend my ballroom for just a little music for the blind. Dolly dear,

you'll not fail me? You know I count on you to look after people. I am

going to hide away in some little corner. Isn't it strange," she said

to Jacques, "how life goes on?"

Dolly and he went to the door with her. There was no one in the big

hall.

Dolly said, "That man is really too stupid."

Lisette said, "You are lucky to have a man-servant at all."

"What a lovely sunset!" said Dolly in the open door.

"Yes," said Lisette, "isn't it?"

"Your car is there?"

"Yes; good-bye, Dolly darling; good-bye, Jacques, and thank you."

As they turned back from the door, Dolly said, "Poor little thing,

isn't she lovely in her mourning?"

She put her arm through his as they went across the hall together. "I'm

so glad to have you, Jacques," she said, "you can't imagine, and I'm so

proud of you. You don't forget me there, Jacques; you love me just as

you always did?"

He was thinking. Six days' leave, perhaps two days extended. In nine

days Dolly might be wearing a little white frill inside a veil of heavy

crape, and just her pearls. And she would say to people that he had

been all her life, and that it was the death he would have chosen. And

in six weeks she would let the salon be used for just a little music

for the blind.

"Do you know," she said as they went up the stairs together, "it was

most beautiful, that thing Lisette said, her little summing up of it:

'His whole life was the woman who loved him, and for his country he

died.' It made me think, you know, of Dante, those four lines of Pia

dei Tolomei."

At the top of the stairs she turned to him, a step or two above him,

standing higher than he. "Look at me, Jacques, and tell me I have not

changed, and that you love me. What are you laughing at?"

"Nothing." He came up the steps and took her hands, and kissed the

fingers of first one hand then the other. "These last weeks I have been

always laughing; you must not mind. And, dear, I'm so glad you do your

hair like that, and remember things from Dante, and play with the tips

of roses, and that you do not understand."

Sunday, July 2nd

Last night Paris streets heard the cannon of the great prelude. The

breeze, that was fresh and sweet from the country, brought in the

sound of the cannon. In the silence of the night the streets listened.

It was a sound regular and even. If Time were a great clock the sound

of its ticking would be like that, on and on. If there were one great

pulse that beat for all the life of the world, its throb would be like

that, unceasing, relentless. It seemed like something that had always

been, that always would be. It seemed as if one were used to it, had

always been accustomed to the burden of sound that, the whole night

through, the sweet fresh breeze brought in to Paris, and would have to

go on bearing it always.

But when the city stopped listening, and took up its way again with the

morning, the sound of the battle was lost in the small immediate sounds

of the day's life.

In the trees I look to from my window, there was a great disturbance of

birds, field birds and forest birds, driven into the city by the smoke

and thunder that possess their land.

My hospital is almost empty. In all the wards there are waiting rows

of empty beds, a nightshirt folded on each pillow. Rows of empty beds

waiting----

Monday, July 3rd

This is a dark day, the colour of battles, for battles are not of

scarlet and gold, only dark.

It is as if the darkness of the day and the darkness of the smoke of

battle are terribly mingled together.

Tuesday, July 4th

The people who went to that church were proud, they were very proud of

him, he had died so beautifully. Each one of them was proud to say, "He

was my friend," or "I knew his people," or "I saw him once," or just,

"He was an American." He had died for an ideal they all had sight of.

It was only a memorial service. There were only the two flags, the flag

of France and the Stars and Stripes, in the aisle before the altar. He

was lying somewhere inside the enemy lines, as he had fallen.

They of the air, they go so far; and if they fall, it is perhaps a

little more sad and lonely because it may be where no one of their own

can go to them. Perhaps the enemy have laid a wreath there on the

place where he fell, as they do sometimes, those men of the air, to

honour one another's memory. They say on the inscription of the wreaths

sometimes: "To our enemy who died for his country." For this boy they

would need to say another thing, "To our enemy who died for his ideal."

I think that we, in the church, were not sorry, but were glad for him,

that we were envying him--we who only live.

Invaded Town, Wednesday, July 5th

To-day I was shown a letter that came--I was not told by what

means--from one of the invaded towns of the North. It was the letter

of a girl who with her father kept an old book-shop in the Place de

l'Eglise. It was written to her sister, married in Paris, from whom

they had had no news since the war began, but to whom they had managed

to get word through--I do not know how--once or twice.

The letter, received only yesterday, was dated January 16. It told of

a thing that had been vaguely rumoured here, that the papers had not

mentioned, and that had passed for the most part unbelieved. The girl

supposed her sister would have heard, and would be terrified for them,

and was anxious to let her know that they were safe. I imagine the girl

with a smooth blonde head and grave blue eyes, and the father, thin

and stooping, with delicate white features and white hair, and a black

skull-cap.

The letter began by saying that they were very well, and that the house

was but slightly damaged. Aunt Emeline was with them, as her house was

quite in ruins: she had been got out from behind the falling of the

stair wall. It was impossible to go to the house of Cousine Thérèse,

but she was safe with the children at the neighbour Payen's. The whole

family had escaped miraculously. The girl said that in the midst of

such terrible suffering they were ashamed to have suffered scarcely at

all. It seemed as if they were not bearing their part of the sacrifice.

She had thought, that night, it was the house falling, and she had

leaped out of bed, thinking she must go to her father. The shock had

lasted ten seconds. She had had time to get in the dark half-way across

the rocking floor, and to realize it was not only the house but the

whole city that was rent and sundered. She had had time to think, "It

must be an earthquake."

"That is what _they_ tried, at first, to say it was," she wrote, "an

earthquake. _But we know that it was an explosion brought about by one

of us._ It was the Arsenal and the casemates of the eighteen bridges

full of powder, between the three chief gates of the town, that were

blown up. It was one of their most important depôts of munitions,

where they had stored enough powder and high explosives to feed their

Northern army for ten months. No one knows who did it. They have posted

up offers of high reward for any one who finds the author of what they

now call 'the criminal accident.'

"In all the towns of the North, where windows were broken and doors

torn out of their frames, and where it was at first thought to be

an earthquake, they have now put up posters on the walls, in their

language and ours, demanding information about the 'criminal.'

"But even if there are some who know, not one will betray. Moreover, he

is surely safe from betrayal, dead and buried somewhere under the ruins

he himself caused for the sake of his country."

The letter went on to tell of the town so sacrificed: streets and

quarters destroyed entirely, not a house anywhere but was more or less

injured, the least harmed streets deep in broken glass and blocked with

fallen tiles and stones. The whole town was become a place of homeless

and wounded and dead.

The young girl kept repeating that no one complained; it was for the

sake of their country. The homeless people in the streets said to one

another, "It is less than our soldiers suffer in the trenches."

She wrote of things she had seen in that night: a father carrying his

boy, of perhaps fifteen years, in his arms, not believing he was dead;

a woman they could not get near, under the ruins, alive, her child

killed beside her; a woman gone mad, running in the streets, shrieking

a man's name; another woman, running also, with her baby in her arms,

begging every one she met to mend it, for its head had been cut off.

All the less unhappy people had taken in the homeless; of the

inhabitants of all the ruined houses, by the next night less than fifty

were left to the care of the town.

The girl wrote: "The people of the town are admirable, the homeless

with the rest; we know that the sacrifice is for our country, and we

make it gladly. The terrible suffering of the town is offered up for

victory and peace."

She went on to tell of little things: "Your room we have given to a

mother with three babies; I have Aunt Emeline with me, sleeping in

father's room, for mine is not safe--the roof of the next house has

fallen against its roof. Father sleeps in the room behind the shop,

and in the shop we have found place to take in ten of the destitute.

The shock threw most of the books out of their cases, and loosened the

cases from the walls, so that we have had to prop them up. The books

are heaped out of the way of the mattresses of the homeless. I thought

father would worry about the books; you know, he has always felt them

to be live things; but he has no thought for them. He is in the Place

all day, trying to help clear away the glass and stones. The tower of

the church has fallen all across the Place. All the windows in the town

are broken, and there is no glass to be had for mending them. We live

behind paper windows, in a gloom that does depress one."

The letter went from one subject to another, nervously and rather

confusedly. She told of immense blocks of stone, hurled from great

distances into the streets; of the fronts of houses ripped out, and the

stories dropped or sagging; of Aunt Emeline's poor little belongings

all lost--the portrait of great-grandfather; how the enormous factories

of ---- and ---- had served as a screen to protect the town, or else it

had been destroyed completely; of one of the little homeless children

in the book-shop who kept all the time saying her prayers, "Little

Jesus, stay with us; little Jesus, stay with us," and how her name was

Cecilette; of the bitter cold that made it all more cruel; and, always,

how they were proud to offer up the sacrifice for their country.

She sent her love, and her father's, always more and more tenderly.

It seemed as if their love for Mariette, of whom they had no word,

increased every day. She kept saying over and over how proud the town

was, to have made the sacrifice; and what a brave thing for, perhaps,

one man alone to have brought about.

That Naughty Little Boy

It was that naughty little boy who was killed, to whose funeral she

went this morning in the church of St. Augustin. That naughty little

boy--grown up, wandered far, always a "bad case," come home because

there was war, and gone out with the rest--is dead magnificently.

He was shot down leading an attack upon the works of Thiaumont; they

say his men would have followed him anywhere. Think of that naughty

little boy, grown up to become a leader men were proud to follow unto

death!

He used to pull her hair, and pinch her, and make faces to frighten her

until she cried. His Miss never could manage him. His Miss and hers

were friends, as were his mother and her mother, and she was obliged to

play with him. She was terrified of him, but he had wonderful toys that

she adored, especially the popgun and rocking-horses. Sometimes when he

was being punished, she was left alone with his toys, and was happy.

Sometimes he would be nice for a minute, and want to kiss and make up,

and let her ride the big rocking-horse.

She was remembering it all this morning in the church.

Through all the years between she had never seen him, and for her he

was still the bad little boy. It was the big rocking-horse she was

particularly remembering in the church.

There was a crowd in the church. There was a whole firmament of

candles; the church was hung with flags, and full of flowers. The

tricolour and the palms were laid upon his bier. And upon the bier also

there was laid his blue cap and jacket, stained and faded and torn by

shell, and his Croix de Guerre and Légion d'Honneur.

There were all his people in the church, mourning for him. For years

none of them had seen him or spoken of him. But now they were all come

to do him honour. The world, that had turned a cold shoulder on him,

was come to kneel beside his blue jacket and his medals.

She remembered vaguely hearing something about some woman he had loved,

and who had loved him, for whom he had been exiled. She wondered if

that woman had been in the church, that woman who could have no place

among his people. If she were there, it must have been in the dusk of

some aisle chapel, apart and alone.

Naughty little boy, despair of every governess; mauvais sujet, who had

erred so far out of the paths of his world; soldier of France, who

fought and led and fell--there he had lain in state, honoured of all,

under his flag and palms.

Now it is over, the bad and the good of it, and of all is left only the

blue cap and jacket, and the medals of war.

Little Mild Gentleman

The little mild gentleman of teacups and cakes--so useful when there

were people who simply had to be asked--always ready to fill a place,

considerate of old ladies--of course, they did not want him at the

Front. He had rather bad lungs, or something, and was shortsighted at

that; it was absurd of him even to try to get out--no army doctor would

pass him.

After months and months of effort, he at last succeeded in getting

himself taken on for ammunition work and the making of poison gases.

Somebody met him the other day, strutting along in his blue coat and

red trousers. Very hurried and important, he had yet to stop and

tell all about it, his tea-party manner quite vanished away, his

shortsighted eyes no longer mild.

"It is I who tell you," he said, "I who know well, there will not a

single one of them be left alive within miles and miles of this new

stuff we are making."

Gossip

Since his death she has been nursing in a typhus hospital, somewhere

just behind the lines. It is now more than ten months. No one has seen

her, scarcely any one has heard from her. Some people say that she is

doing "wonderful work" and some people say that it is all pose, and

some people say that she has an affair with the chief doctor of the

hospital, or is it with the maire of the town? No one has seen her, but

every one says she has lost her looks.

She used to be very pretty, and a great favourite in the world. She

looked absurdly like her two babies.

The babies are at the château with their grandmother, his mother, who

is an invalid--two lovely cherubs at the age of Russian blouses.

The house off the Avenue du Bois, that used to be one of the most

charming in Paris, has been closed since the war.

He enlisted when the war broke out, as a common soldier of infantry.

It certainly was chic of him, for he was réformé because of some grave

enough trouble of the heart, and he might easily have kept out of it

all, or have got something showy but not dangerous. However, he took a

humble place, and his share of great hardship. He had been accustomed

all his life to everything that belongs to wealth and rank, and his

share of the burden must have been very heavy for him.

People said: How proud of him she must be. He had always been thought a

little dull, a dear boy, but perhaps a little dull; one would not have

dreamed he had it in him.

People said: They had always been such a devoted couple, an ideal

young couple. How sad it would be if anything happened to him.

In spite of the difficulties due to his being réformé, he got out at

last to the Front. He was wounded only a short time after, not in any

attack, or with any glory, but in bringing up the comrades' soup to the

trenches. It was a shell wound in the thigh, not especially dangerous.

He was invalided straight through to Paris, to one of the big city

hospitals, and put, of course, in the ward with other common soldiers.

It was a moment of terrible crowding of the hospitals: doctors and

nurses were overworked; there was necessarily much confusion. It was no

one's fault, perhaps, only the inevitableness of things, that for three

days the Surgeon Major had no time himself to attend to the less badly

wounded.

The man with the wound in the thigh asked nothing of any one. He did

not even ask, they say, to have his people sent for.

They were all down at the château; it was only after forty-eight hours

that they got word of what had happened to him and where he was.

His wife came up to town. His mother, of course, was not able to come,

and it had not seemed worth while to bring the little boys.

That was when he had been for two days in the hospital.

Here is a part of the thing that people say they do not understand.

It seems as if his wife might have had him moved out of the common

ward. It is a little dreadful to think of him there, who had always

been used to so much luxury--among the grey blankets, the coarse grey

sheets, the beds and stretcher-beds crowded together, a bottle of the

hospital champagne on the night-table, the black man in the next bed

screaming. She might, it would seem, have had in their own doctor, or

any one of the big doctors. She surely might have got permission to

stay in the ward and sit by him the night he died.

He died the night after the operation. They had amputated too late.

It was only the third day that the chief saw him. They amputated next

morning, and he died in the night.

In that hospital they do not put a screen about the bed of one who dies.

If only some one had done something while there was time. It seems

such a sad waste of a life, and such a dreary end. You see he had had

no glory. It was for bringing up the comrades' soup that he had died.

There were no medals to be left after him, with his blue coat and his

cap. I suppose there was just one of those coarse grey sheets drawn up

over him till they carried him out of the ward.

Some people say he did not want to live. But then he was probably too

ill to concern himself much about anything. Some people say his wife

did not want him to live. But then she may have been too confused and

stunned to be able to concern herself about anything. Some people say

she loved another man, and some people say he loved another woman.

Well, from him no one will ever know. It appears also as if no one were

likely ever to know from her.

And now, no one sees her or hears from her any more.

His mother, who for a time would not speak of her, says now only

that her devotion in the typhus hospital is wonderful, and her

self-sacrifice; that she renders incalculable service there, and is

above all praise.

That much is true.

And people give all sorts of different, amazing reasons for it.

They all agree, however, upon one point--that she has lost her looks

completely.

Smoke

Suddenly, as the motor was passing the Place de la Concorde, Valérie

said, "Would you mind if we just went home? I should like to go home."

Of course Nanette could only say that she did not mind.

Valérie had invited her to drive in the Bois and have tea at the little

chalet of gaufres, by the gate of the Pré Catelan; she had her mother's

motor car for the afternoon, and they need not take anybody with them.

Nanette had thought it would be such fun, just the two of them, without

governesses or maids. She had been looking forward to it for days.

Nanette was still in the schoolroom, whereas Valérie, nearly two years

older, had escaped from all that. The younger girl admired Valérie

immensely. They had seen a good deal of one another three years before

in a summer at Dinard. Then the difference between their ages had

mattered less; but now, dividing the schoolroom girl with her hair just

tied back from the girl who would have been going out if war had not

ended the world, it invested Valérie with a glamour of romance for the

little Nanette. The romance, moreover, was heightened by the fact that

people talked rather much of the older girl and coupled her name most

unhappily with that of a man she never could marry, who was proving

himself to be one of the heroes of the war.

Nanette would have been very proud to have had tea in the Bois with her

beautiful friend. She said she did not mind turning back, but she did

mind rather. She thought it odd indeed of Valérie to change like that.

And Valérie's way of saying it was so odd, as if she had been all the

time trying to keep it back and could not.

Valérie spoke through the tube to the chauffeur, and he turned the car.

She, Valérie, talked much and fast as they went back to the rue de

Varennes, but she did not tell why she had changed her mind so suddenly.

The court of the old hôtel seemed more than usually boring and solemn

to Nanette, and also the dim grave stairway. She would rather have had

tea in the salon of the peacock tapestries, but Valérie told the old

man-servant to bring it up to her little sitting-room.

She went in at her own door ahead of Nanette, and looked about her as

if for something she expected to find in the room. She seemed so odd

that Nanette just stood back against the door watching her.

After quite a minute Valérie turned to her and said, "Tell me, does it

not seem to you that there is smoke in the room?"

The room was full of the afternoon July sunshine. The window that gave

on to the garden was open. There were some arum lilies in a vase, and

their fragrance was heavy in the sunshine.

"Why, no," said Nanette, "there is no smoke here."

Valérie began moving about the room aimlessly. As she moved here and

there she was taking off her long suède gloves that Nanette admired.

"It is very queer," she said, never looking at Nanette, "but for days,

three days, it has seemed to me all the time that my room was full of

smoke. I see it and smell it. At first I thought something must be

burning somewhere. But there was nothing. Besides, it is not that sort

of smoke. It is the smoke of gunpowder."

She had thrown her gloves down on a chair, and was taking off her hat.

She pulled the pins out of it, one after the other, and took it off,

and thrust the pins back into it. "It is quite different from other

smoke," she said, "there is no doubting what it is."

"Gunpowder smoke! Oh, but Valérie----"

Valérie went on, "Sometimes the smoke is so thick in the room that I

cannot make my way about; it burns my eyes most dreadfully, it gets

into my throat and chokes me, it makes me cry." She tossed her hat

into the chair with her gloves, and turned to the mirror over the

mantelpiece, and stood with her hands up, fluffing out her lovely gold

hair. "It is not only that I cry because I am frightened," she said,

"it is also that the smoke actually hurts my throat and eyes."

Nanette, standing behind her, could see her face in the mirror and

thought it was become curiously stiff and dull. Valérie's lovely face,

usually so full of expression, had become quite blank.

It was dreadful. The younger girl was afraid of--she did not know what.

She could think of nothing that would have been of any use to say. She

knew the older girl was telling her this thing only because she had to

tell it to some one.

"You see," Valérie continued, "that is why I wanted to come home. I

cannot bear to be long away from my room, because I am so afraid of

missing the moment." She had turned back from the mirror, and stood

looking past Nanette.

"The moment?" Nanette repeated, as she did not go on.

"Yes, the moment when the smoke will lift. It is every time more dense.

There will be a time when it quite, quite blinds me, and then I shall

see." She sat down in the chair that was nearest her. She sat limply,

leaning back against the cushions, her hands lying loosely together in

her lap.

Nanette had been standing all the time just inside the door. Now she

came nearer, but not quite close, and she did not sit down. It was as

if there were something encircling Valérie and keeping every one and

everything apart from her. Nanette thought of the spells cast about

fairy-tale princesses, a circle of magic drawn around, that no one

could step across.

Valérie sat rigid, her eyes staring. The clock on the chimney began to

strike five.

Nanette sprang forward. "Valérie, Valérie, what is the matter?" But

Valérie did not hear her.

Nanette caught her hand. It was icy cold. "Valérie, Valérie!" She let

the cold hand go, and touched her cheek.

But Valérie did not feel the touch.

Nanette flew to the door and opened it and called into the passage,

"Jeanne-Marie, Jeanne-Marie!"

The old Bretonne nurse came instantly out from her door down the

passage.

"Jeanne-Marie, quick, something has happened to mademoiselle."

The old woman passed her, and was beside Valérie. "God and the saints!

It has came again!" she cried. She put her arms about Valérie and the

girl fell stiffly against her shoulder. "Oh, my lamb, my little lamb!"

"Is she dead?" implored Nanette. "Jeanne-Marie, is she dead?"

"No, no, it has happened before. Go call Francine, quick."

The maid was already at the door; she must have heard the excited

voices.

The old nurse said to the maid, "Help me get her to the sofa." To

Nanette she said, "Go away, mademoiselle; you must go away."

Nanette besought, "No, oh, no!"

But the maid said, "Please, mademoiselle, Jeanne-Marie knows," and

pushed her out of the room as if she had been a child.

Nanette, terribly frightened, waited outside in the passage, walking up

and down.

After a long while Francine came and told her that mademoiselle was

herself again, but very tired and must rest.

From her own home, an hour later, Nanette telephoned, and was told that

mademoiselle was asleep.

The next day Valérie sent asking her to come about five o'clock.

Nanette was taken first to Valérie's mother, in the drawing-room.

The marquise was as stately and frigid as usual, dressed for the

street, rather hurried and most difficult to talk to.

She told Nanette that she was troubled about the fright she must have

had yesterday, and asked her not to speak to any one of what had

occurred. She looked at Nanette through her tortoiseshell lorgnon, and

asked if Valérie had been talking to her of anything in particular

before she fainted. "Had she been agitating herself with any special

confidences?" she asked.

"No," faltered Nanette, wondering.

The marquise went on to explain that Valérie was very much run down

just now and nervous, and, in these last days, had had one or two

fainting spells, such as that of yesterday, but less grave. She again

asked Nanette not to speak of it. She appeared more concerned about

people knowing of it, and about something she evidently feared Nanette

might have imagined, than about what had happened to Valérie.

Nanette was anxious only to get to Valérie, who wanted her.

She found a little white Valérie snuggled down in the pillows of the

big rose-hung bed. She seemed very quiet and rested, not strange as she

had been yesterday, only tired. Her brown eyes looked bigger than ever,

dark-circled, and her golden hair was very soft and curly about her

face, like a child's hair.

She made Nanette sit close to her, and held her hand while she told her

strange things, as if they were not strange at all.

When she spoke of yesterday it was as if she were speaking of something

that happened very long ago. "I ought not to have brought you home

with me," she said, "but you see I was afraid then. I was afraid to

be alone. I knew the smoke was going to lift, I knew I was going to

be shown something, and I was afraid to go through it alone. Old

Jeanne-Marie is a darling, but she is different, of course. And mother

would have been so annoyed if I had spoken of him. Mother has known all

the time how unhappy we were, you see, and was always awfully annoyed

about it."

Nanette, half understanding, could only say, as Valérie paused, "I am

so frightened about you."

"Poor Nanette! You must not be frightened, for I am not frightened any

more. It is all going to be well, very soon. Only I have got to tell

you about it, because I am so lonely. I must tell some one. I am not a

bit unhappy any more, but just to-day lonely. I have got to tell you,

though it is selfish of me."

"I love you to tell me, please, Valérie."

"I was terribly unhappy," Valérie went on, "when I thought it was only

he who would die. I knew, the moment I realized it was gunpowder smoke,

that he was going to be killed. I knew that the smoke would lift for me

when the moment came, and that then I should see him die."

"Valérie, oh, Valérie!"

"But you need not be sad for me, Nanette, because there is a thing I

know that makes it all quite beautiful and right." She lifted herself

up from the pillows, still holding Nanette's hand; the two heavy gold

braids of her hair fell over her shoulders. "You see, we never could

have been happy together, he and I," she said, "there would have been

nothing but unhappiness for us both, always. I must tell you what I

saw. I must have some one know, and you seem to understand things. You

will not speak of it, till afterwards. And now, as I am telling you,

you will not interrupt me, will you? You will not say any of the things

most people would say, to break into my peace?" She stopped and waited,

looking at Nanette intensely.

Nanette could not speak at all.

But Valérie must have understood, for she told it. She told it always

quietly, as if she had passed beyond any shock or grief or sense of its

strangeness: "The smoke was all about him, and about them; he and they

had to fight blindly. They fought with bayonets. It was in the street

of a village; I saw the cobbles under his feet, and a broken doorstep.

He fought and fought. It seemed very long; he was quite alone to fight

against so many of them. There were blue heaps behind him on the

cobbles; I could make out just vaguely through the smoke. I think they

were his comrades, wounded and dead. The others, the grey ones, were

too many. I saw their grey shapes and their bayonets, and his wounds. I

saw his face, just as he went down. His face was all alight, as it was

the last time I saw him." Her own eyes were shining when she stopped,

and her voice was like a singing.

In the quiet of the room Nanette waited, as if there were some spell

she was afraid to break.

Valérie told her: "The last time I saw him was when he went out, nearly

two years ago. I knew the station he would be passing through, with

just some minutes there; and I went, and waited for him. I did not care

if people knew. I ran to him in the crowd, and he saw me, and he said,

'Why, my Valérie, it is you!' as if there were a miracle. In my vision,

his face was just as it had been then. There was no sound at all in my

vision, but from his face, as he died, I knew he was saying, 'Why, my

Valérie, it is you!'" Her warm, live hand held Nanette's hand steadily.

"I know that I shall go to meet him, that I shall be waiting for him

when he dies; I _know_, Nanette. I know because of the look there was

in his face. I shall be waiting there, and he shall see me. And so I

have no grief or fear." She was patting Nanette's hand to comfort her.

"Is not it strange, Nanette; to-day I have a letter from him, a sad

letter. And I have written him a happy one, and he will not understand

why at all. He does not know how soon we will be together. I cannot

tell him. And I am lonely waiting, now I know. Nanette, I am so glad

that it is I who will go first."

Perhaps, when she is older, Nanette will have to wonder if there was

something she might have done.

But nothing would have made any difference.

In the next days they had many doctors. But none of the doctors knew

what it was, or could do anything.

A week from the day when the smoke had lifted, Nanette sent arum

lilies for old Jeanne-Marie to put into Valérie's hands.

And three days after that, the man Valérie never could have married was

killed.

He had gone down, it was known afterwards, in house-to-house fighting,

in a street of the village of X----.

Hospital, Saturday, July 8th

Some new ones are arrived from the Somme, only ten for my ward, the

orderly told me at the gate. They were brought in at four o'clock this

morning. The orderly, Hamond, said, "They are nothing so bad as the

Verduns."

When I came to the top of the stairs, Madame Marthe was in the

corridor, waiting for Madame Bayle to come and unlock the linen-press.

She looked very tired already, at the beginning of the day, and she was

walking up and down between the stairs and the door of our ward, not

able to keep still for a minute.

She told them off on her small fine fingers, stained with iodine: "Two

heads, one of them has a bad leg-wound also; one amputé of the arm,

infected; two of the leg, infected both of them; two faces; a bad

chest-wound, bullet; other two slight. Zut! that Madame Bayle, will

she never come! Run over to the store-house and tell them I have got to

have tubes and funnels to feed the 9 and 14. See that they give them to

you, whatever fuss they make, tell them it is for very bad faces. Quick

now, the chief has been around, and they are going to trepan the worst

head this morning."

Hospital, Sunday, July 9th

The man they trepanned yesterday will not keep still; he worries about

everything. They say he is doing well, but he talks all the time. They

told me to sit by him and try to make him stay quiet. At first he held

my hand and seemed to rest, but he would not shut his eyes, and after a

little he began to talk again.

He was worried because he thought I had not enough to eat; he thought,

because I was so thin, that I must be very poor. He said he had some

biscuits and some rillettes de Tours done up together in a piece of

newspaper. The package had been in his musette when he went into the

charge. Where was his musette? He would have me go and find it, and eat

the biscuits, and the rillettes de Tours. He worried because he had

fallen back into a trench deep with water, and the newspaper package

might have got wet. But I must not mind that, he said, it was better

than starving. What had they done with his musette? I must go and get

it. And I must not mind taking his biscuits and rillettes de Tours, for

he was not hungry at all.

Monday, July 10th

All day long there has been sunshine, and the sky has been blue.

There were great white clouds that mounted up over the city, and that

one kept imagining was the smoke of battle. The blue of the sky was

wonderful, infinite and near, like something of music or of religion,

and the sunshine was like golden wine. But those soft white puffs of

cloud were terrible.

At the top of the Champs Elysées, behind the Arch, the clouds were

driven up as if it were from the mouths of cannon.

It must be just like that the smoke is rising in the sunshine over the

high edge of a field I used to know. They say that field is laid across

everywhere with railroad tracks, along which monster grey cannon crawl

up to their positions, and crawl back across again when their work is

done. Hundreds of horses are corralled in the field, and everywhere

there are dotted little white tents. Sometimes black faces come to the

openings of the tents, and one would think of the Village Nègre people

went to see in Magic City, ages and ages ago.

It seems strange that when the great white clouds mounted up from

behind the Arch of Triumph, the city did not rock beneath them. It

seems strange that the great white clouds rose silently and really were

only clouds.

Thursday, July 13th

People in the streets go slowly, looking up at the flags, and stopping

to stand. They speak to one another wherever they happen to be standing

together, and say that they hope to-morrow will be a fine day.

The streets are getting ready for to-morrow, hanging out flags and

streamers and garlands to the breeze that is strong to-day, and to the

comings and goings of sunshine. Grey minutes and gold minutes follow

one another across the city, where the flags of the different nations

are blending their colours and waving all together.

Many different uniforms, on their way up and down the streets, salute

one another, and stop and linger about together, looking at their flags.

The streets are full of bandages and crutches, pinned-up trouser-legs

and pinned-up coat-sleeves, steps that halt along with tap of canes,

and shuffling, uncertain steps that must be led.

One is always coming in the streets upon an especial type of little

group of people, one might indeed think each time that it was the same

little group over again, so much each different one of them resembles

all the others--four or five women, an old man, a young sick-looking

man, and quite a tagging on of children. One knows that they are

refugees. They have the unmistakable look of refugees. It gives them

all that likeness, every little dragging tribe of them to every other.

It is the look of people who are waiting for something, and to whom

nothing in the meanwhile matters. They are indifferent and dull because

nothing else matters. They make no effort and take no trouble--of what

use? It is not worth their while to better things that will not last.

There is always a woman in poor rusty deep mourning who has tied her

little girl's hair with a Belgian ribbon.

Music comes and goes at odd times through the streets, as pipe and drum

and trumpet of to-morrow's procession are moved this way and that to

their various places.

You get fragments of strange music, sometimes come from very far-away

strange countries, to these streets.

Friday, July 14th: Pink Shoes

It would be too unkind of it to rain, as if the fête were not already

shadowed enough.

One was angry waking in the rain.

It rained when they took their wreaths and flowers to the statues of

Strasburg and Lille, and it rained when the troops were massed before

the Invalides for the prise d'armes.

But afterwards the rain did stop.

A girl and a limping soldier, ahead of us as we went to the Nord-Sud,

were sopping wet. I suppose they had been standing for hours on the

Esplanade. Her knitted cape and cotton blouse were quite soaked

through. She had no hat, and she was laughing because her brown curls

dripped into her eyes.

In the Place de la Concorde people had put down their umbrellas, and

were telling one another that it was really better not to have the heat

of sunshine.

We waited a little with the crowd in the Place, the friendly, orderly

Paris crowd that used to come to fêtes so gaily, grave now, almost

solemn. The crowd was full of wounded. The men flung back out of

the war, broken, were come to watch their comrades pass between two

battles. The crowd gave place to them, and they were proud in it.

Then Diane came, with Miss and the babies, both of them tremendously

excited in their little mackintosh coats.

One of the club servants showed us to the small writing-room, where

a window had been reserved for us. From the window we looked down on

the wide grey stream of the street between banks of people. One way

we could see the great Place kept clear also, in grey reaches, past

islands of crowd, and the other way we could see a heap of people on

the steps of the Madeleine.

The babies sat on the window-ledge and forgot everything at once

because of another baby, down in the crowd on the opposite kerb, who

wore a pink bonnet and pink shoes, and had a little flag in either hand.

"Oh, mummy, her mummy has put down a newspaper for her to stand on, so

the wet won't hurt her shoes."

"Yes, Cricri darling. Don't wriggle so, child; Miss, do watch out for

her."

"I've got pink shoes, too, haven't I, Fafa?"

Diane, holding Fafa very tight on the window-ledge--not because he

wriggled, he was too big, but because he might have been grown up, like

the little boys of other mothers, and gone away to war--was telling him

what a wonderful thing it was he had come to see, and how, when he was

a big man, he would always remember it, and could say to people, "On

the 14th of July, 1916, I saw----"

"Yes, mummy! Oh, mummy, do you suppose that little girl's shoes are

quite new for to-day?"

"Babies, you are going to see Belgian soldiers; you will always and

always remember what they did for us. And there will be British

soldiers; you know how they are fighting for us, just the same as papa

and Uncle Raoul. And you will see the Russians, who have come from so

far away to help us; and beautiful Hindus, and big Africans, and the

little Anamites, and our own men."

Her voice thrilled when she said "our own men."

Her voice has that curious quality of drawing darkness: it made me feel

the shadows when she said like that, "our own men."

She said, "There will be the fusilliers marins, and the cuirassiers,

and the artilleurs. You may see the 75', Fafa. And there will be the

chasseurs à pied, from Verdun, with their fourragère."

"Mummy, was it her mummy who gave her the little flags?"

"I think so, Fafa darling."

"Is it her mummy there with her?"

"I think so."

"Is her papa gone to the war, like my papa?"

Diane put her cheek down against the top of his little fuzzy head as

she stood with her arms around him.

"Is her papa gone to the war too, mummy?"

"I think so."

"She has to stand up all the time, mummy, will she not be tired? I am

afraid she will be tired before the procession comes. When will the

procession come, mummy?"

Diane said to me, "To think it is the first day of flags and music we

have had since the war began----"

I was thinking all the time of the day when the troops will come home.

I was thinking that this day was a promise of that day. I knew that

Diane was thinking of that also. Her eyes filled with tears; I saw

them through the tears that were in my own eyes. We both knew so well.

The men look forward fearlessly to that day, but the women know fear.

Every woman in the crowd was thinking how this day promised that day,

gloriously; and every one was thinking--but if _he_ does not come home.

The people were come to their day of flags and music almost as if it

were to some religious ceremony. They waited in the grey morning to see

their troops go by; coming from battles, going back again to battles,

and always with the war so close that, if it were not for the sounds of

the city, we could have heard its thundering.

Diane said, because she did not want the children to think she was sad,

"The little pink girl must have come very early to have got so good a

place."

"Mummy, did she have a nice breakfast before she came?"

"Oh, yes, a lovely breakfast."

"Will the procession never come, mummy dear? That little girl must be

so tired. Why doesn't the procession come, mummy?"

"Oh, there's the sun," Cricri sang out, wriggling in Miss's arms, and

clapping her hands. "There's the sun come out!"

The sun shone straight into our eyes for a few minutes, and then the

soft grey settled down again.

We heard the sound of music and of marching, from a long way off.

The crowd stirred and thrilled.

"They are coming," cried the babies, "they're coming!"

"Yes, yes, they're coming. What is that the band plays? There's the

Garde Républicaine, and the music--listen, babies! And now it is

Belgian music. There are the Belgians--see the people run out to give

them flowers! There are the mitrailleuses and the Lanciers and the

Cyclistes!"

"Mummy, I've got a bicycle too, haven't I; and I can ride it well,

can't I?"

"Now the English, with their music! Cricri, do keep still and let Miss

see. How beautifully they march! Aren't you proud, Miss? There are the

Ansacs, Fafa; and look at the Indians! The street is carpeted with

flowers: they cannot pick them up, they walk over them. There are the

Russians. Look, babies, the little boys and girls from the crowd run

out and pick up the flowers to give them! Listen, the Russian music

sounds like great seas and winds in forests. It will be our own men

coming now, Fafa."

"Mummy, oh, mummy! I can't see the little girl any more!"

"Now it will be our own men coming! Look, look, babies, to see the very

first of them! There's our own music--listen."

Holding Fafa close against her shoulder, she leaned out past him over

the window-ledge, her eyes lighted with that flame one knows in

soldiers' eyes.

"They will be our own men, who have fought for us, who will go back to

fight for us. Fafa, think of it! Here they are, their music--oh, oh, it

is the Chant du Départ!"

"Mummy, do you think we'll never any more see the little girl with the

pink shoes?"

Monday, July 17th

Twenty-eight beds and ten stretcher-beds, the ward is full again. They

are all from the Somme. They are not nearly so bad as those from Verdun

and the Champagne. There has been only one of them, so far, who died.

He was brought in on Wednesday, they operated next morning, and he died

in the night. The wound had become gangrenous.

He was twenty-five years old. He was from the invaded countries, and

had no one, no one at all, who could come. He had had no news of his

people since the beginning of the war, nor had he been able to send his

news to them. He had never been out of his little commune, except to go

to the trenches. He had no name to give of any friend.

The patronne told me to go to the funeral, for there was no one else

to go. None of the real nurses could be spared, and very few of the

men from downstairs would be able to walk so far. It was to be at

Pantin. We would go first to the church. We would leave the hospital at

half-past three.

I tell of so many funerals. But there are so many, and they impress me

so. Those men die for us, and we, who may not die--how could it be but

that their dying means more to us than other things? There is nothing

we can do for those who fall and lie on the battlefield. But with

these, here, we go a little way.

And what else is there?

I have got some decent clothes, and I go sometimes to see some one, and

we pretend we are amused by bits of gossip. We say, "Oh, that's a hat

from Rose-Marie!" and, "Where did you get your tricot?" But it is as

if we went on a journey, and we come home tired from it, to the dark

shelter of our thoughts.

One rests better following through endless poor streets after a

pine-box with the flag upon it and the palms.

The people stand back, the men salute, the women make the sign of the

Cross, and we keep our own small perfect silence with us as we pass.

The piquet d'honneur walked with arms reversed, four on either side of

him.

There was no one but me to bring him flowers, but he had a big fine

tin wreath from his comrades of our service, and his palms from the

Ville de Paris, and the spray of zinc flowers with the ribbon marked

"Souvenir Français" that, Madame Bayle said, is always sent from the

Ministère de la Guerre.

Madame Bayle came with us. She is fat and always ill, but she could be

spared from the linen-room. I never had seen her before "en civil."

She had a large black hat from which, she told me, she had, for the

occasion, taken off fourteen red roses. I thought, as we walked

together, "Why, she and I are bitter enemies! For nine months we have

quarrelled every day!"

We walked together, close behind the boy, who had no one but we two and

five of his comrades to follow him.

It was hot, there was no air at all. There was a terrible odour of

disinfectant.

Madame Bayle said, "It is because of the gangrene," and quite worried

for fear I could not stand it.

And I worried about her bad knee. Was it bad to-day? I was afraid she

would be very tired.

We felt most sympathetically about each other.

She kept saying, "It is all the same sad, it is all the same sad."

One of the wounded said, "Not so sad as to lie out for the crows in

no-man's-land."

The Garde Républicaine, standing at attention, formed an aisle for him

and for us to pass through into the church. Of course, they never come

into the church.

Madame Bayle, kneeling stiffly beside him, went on whispering, "C'est

tout de même triste," as if it were a sort of prayer. "C'est tout de

même triste d'être seul comme ça."

An old woman appeared from somewhere and put a little bunch of

marguerites on his flag, and went away again. The stems of the

marguerites were done up in white paper. Some women came and stayed;

and some little girls, and a troop of small boys, in black blouses,

just let out from the school opposite.

When it was over, they all filed out, past Madame Bayle and me, as we

stood in the place where would have been his people.

On and on we went, through streets always sadder and more sad as they

frayed out at the edge of the city.

Madame Bayle always shuffled and panted, and the wounded followed more

and more slowly.

The city gate, and the ramparts, and longer, wider, even sadder streets

to pass along, over the cobbles; then an avenue of limes in fragrant

blossom, and the entrance of the great cemetery.

The piquet d'honneur left us at the gate, and we were just ourselves to

go on with him to the place where the soldiers who are lonely like him

lie, so many of them together.

It is a beautiful place. When his people can come to him I think they

will be proud to find him in so beautiful a place.

We put our flowers with him, and went away Madame Bayle always saying,

"C'est triste tout de même, d'être comme ça, tout seul."

The wounded went so fast ahead of us out of the cemetery that Madame

Bayle could not keep up at all.

She panted, "They are so glad to get out of it, poor boys, poor boys.

They will wait for us at the entrance; We will go all of us together to

the café on the right of the entrance for our 'little glass.'"

Thursday, July 20th: Little Florist

Very early this morning, on my way to the hospital, I stopped at the

little florist's shop round the corner, near the church, to get some

blue and purple larkspur and crimson ramble-roses.

It was so early, I was afraid Jeannette would not yet be back with the

day's flowers from the great central markets.

It is Jeannette, the younger, pretty sister, who goes every morning to

choose the fresh flowers, and Caroline, who in the meanwhile puts the

little shop in order to receive them, washing their window and filling

their bowls and vases with water, and scrubbing out the floor.

Caroline is not yet twenty-five years old, and Jeannette is eighteen.

They are quite alone now to keep the little shop.

Their father is paralyzed, helpless, and they must take care of him.

The brother, who used to take care of them all, is at the war.

Just two years ago, in the early summer, before the war, I remember

that Caroline, who is not really pretty at all, suddenly came to be

quite beautiful. Her small dark thin face was aglow, as if her heart

were full of sunlight, and she moved about the shop in a way so glad

that it seemed as if every little humble thing she had to do were

become for her part of a dance. She gave away to one then more than one

bought of larkspur and ramble-roses, and Jeannette and the big brother

looked on leniently.

All that seems now very long ago.

So few people can bear happy colours in these days, that Jeannette

brings back from the market little else but white and purple flowers,

and green leaves for wreaths and crosses.

I was very early this morning, and Jeannette was not yet come back from

the Halles.

Caroline was down on her knees, scrubbing the floor. She was crying as

she scrubbed the floor.

She had not expected any one to come so early, and she was crying just

as hard as she could cry, while she was alone and had the time.

She got up from her knees and rubbed her bare arm across her eyes.

I thought of her brother at the war, and of the some one because of

whom, perhaps, she had been happy, two years ago. I scarcely dared to

ask, "Is it bad news, Caroline?"

"No, Madame," she said, still rubbing her eyes, "No, Madame, it is

nothing special. It is only as if there were nothing but tears in the

world."

Trains

Two trains are side-tracked in the fields, beyond the little country

station, where the wheat is already bronzed and heavy-headed, and

the poppies flame through it, and where there is all the music of

grasshoppers and crickets and birds.

One is a train of men coming back from the Front on leave, and very

gay. They are all laughing and singing in the carriages. They are all

getting themselves tidied up, for shortly they will be in Paris. The

officers in several of the carriages have managed to get some water,

and are scrubbing luxuriously, with tin-cups and soup-plates for

basins. Soapy faces appear at the windows. The men have opened the

carriage doors all along the train and got out to tumble about in the

grass at the edge of the train. They pick buttercups that grow close to

the rails, and some of them have wandered off into the tall wheat to

gather poppies.

The second train on the siding is full of wounded, who must wait, like

the permissionnaires, to let pass the munition and troop trains going

out. The wounded are quite comfortably arranged on their tiers of

stretchers; the doctors and orderlies have all the needed things, and

move about competently, up and down the train. It is strange how quiet

the train of wounded is. It is only here and there along it that one

hears moaning or a cry.

A munition train crawls by, all grey. It is nothing that the

permissionnaires or wounded need notice.

Then, after a time, that seems very long, comes a troop-train going

out. The men in the troop train hang out of the windows and look

silently upon all the things they are passing in the fields, that seem

so full of peace and so kind.

They wave to the permissionnaires, who are silent for a moment,

watching them as they go. And then they pass the train of wounded, some

of whom look up at them.

Monday, July 24th--5.30 of the morning

Pérot has just gone.

He was noiselessly creeping down the outside stairs from his attic

room. But I was waiting at the door on the landing, and made him come

in for a minute to the apartment.

He sat, loaded down with all his campaign things, in the little yellow

chair, and I sat in the big yellow chair, and we looked at one another.

It is odd how one never can say any of the things to them; and how,

always, they understand perfectly all the things one would say if one

could.

He looked very ill, poor boy. Ten days' leave of convalescence after

five months in the hospital has really not given him enough time to

pick up. And he worries so. He can try to eat, but he cannot sleep at

all. All night he thinks and thinks.

I know so very well just what he thinks.

He has never had many words with which to tell me, for he has had

all his short life to work so hard that he could get little time for

learning to express himself. But sometimes he says, "If I knew they

were dead----"

They are his two little sisters. The mother died five years ago, the

father several years before that. He helped his mother when he was

still a schoolboy to take care of the little sisters, Célestine and

Marie; and when the mother was dead he took care of them alone. Now he

is twenty-four years old, and Célestine is seventeen and Marie sixteen.

Since the day he left, two years less just eleven days ago, he has had

no word of them at all.

Others from those invaded countries have had perhaps messages, a postal

card, some sort of a letter; but he had had no word.

An application we got through for him to the maire of the nearest large

town has had only the answer that the farm exists no more and that

nothing has been known of the two young girls.

It was the "le mauvais sang qu'il faisait," as Madame Marthe said,

that kept him so long from getting well. His wound in the shoulder was

pretty bad, but what was worse was his unceasing grief and dread. He

would have died, of the wound and that, if he had not been so young and

northern and strong.

His wound got itself well. The new ones needed his place in the

hospital. He was given ten days' sick leave, and came to spend it in

the room upstairs, because he had nowhere else to go.

Now his leave has come to an end, and he is going back to his depôt,

and then to the Front. I may never see him again, my poor boy, whose

face goes white and red, and white and red, and whose blue northern

eyes fill with tears if one speaks kindly to him.

He sat in the little yellow chair and I sat in the big yellow chair,

and we looked at each other in the wet grey early morning.

I said, "They gave you a good breakfast?"

"Oh, yes, madame."

"And your little package, for lunch in the train?"

"Oh, yes, madame, and the cigarettes."

"Some letter-paper to write to me on?"

"Yes, madame."

"You have all the money you need, you are sure, my child?"

"Oh, yes, madame, much more than I need. I still have that twenty

francs."

"You promise to let me know if I can do anything for you?"

"Yes, madame."

"And you will take care of yourself, please, Pérot."

"Yes, madame."

The clock struck once, the first quarter hour past five.

"You must go, my child."

He stood up.

I went to the door with him.

"You would not have liked me to come to the train, Pérot?"

"No, madame, because I should have cried; I am so stupid, madame."

"I would have cried too. And so, my child--until a less sad day."

"Madame--thank you."

"No, I thank you, little soldier."

Wednesday, July 26th

This morning, at the hospital, one of the Verdun men came up from the

convalescent ward downstairs, where he was sent when they evacuated for

the Somme, to say good-bye to us. He is well enough, and he is going

back. He is one of the older men, one of those who have the look of

worrying about wives and babies. He has been twice wounded. The first

was a bad wound; he had taken long to get over it in some hospital of

the provinces, and to be able to go back and be wounded again. Now he

is going back for the third time.

I remember his having told me, at first, when he was quite ill and

talked with fever, that he was terribly afraid of Verdun. He said he

did not mind what they did with him if only they did not send him back

to Verdun. He said he was afraid of the bayonet. He could kill with the

gun, he said, but not with the bayonet. He said he stood paralyzed when

it was the moment to strike with the bayonet, and could not strike.

It was after he left my ward that his wife had come up from the

Limousin, and brought the two little girls to visit him. I never saw

her, but I remember how happy he was. He told me his wife could not

stay long because she had to go back and take care of the cows. They

had two cows, he said.

Now he bade good-bye to Madame Marthe, who was washing her hands with

sublimé after a dressing, and who gave him a sharp red elbow to shake.

He said good-bye to the men in the ward, each one in turn, and stood a

minute looking at his old place and said, "One was well off there."

I went to the door with him.

It was very hot in the ward, and there were flies buzzing.

I thought: To be going back to that, when one knows it already;

to be going back to that, when one has no longer youth's élan and

carelessness; when one has to worry over labour and poverty left behind.

I suppose he saw something in my face of what I felt, for he said, in

a kind, pitying way, as if to help me, "Do not be sad, madame." And

he said the thing they all say, all of them, "I' faut b'en, tous les

copains sont là."

"All the others are there."

And then, this afternoon, I heard another soldier say that.

It was in the rue de la Paix. He was giving an order to the chauffeur.

His little boy, in a white piqué dress with a big lace collar, was

standing beside him, dancing up and down and hanging on his hand.

His wife leaned out of the window of the motor and called to me as I

passed, and he turned. I stopped, and we talked for a minute.

He has been home on a six days' leave and is going back to-night.

He is a captain in the chasseurs à pied. Before the war he was an

officer in a smart cavalry regiment, but he had himself transferred

into the infantry when the war began. I have heard the men in the

hospital talk of him. They say, "C'est un type épatant, celui-là." They

say he never sends his men to reconnoitre, but goes himself, always.

He looked very young and splendid in his smart uniform, standing at the

door of the motor.

The little boy, always dancing up and down beside him, said, "We've got

his picture taken! We've got his picture taken!"

His wife tried to laugh but I saw her eyes in the shadow of her white

lace hat. "It's true," she said, "we dragged him to it, poor boy. We

had nothing decent of him at all, you know."

She was very lovely in her lovely things, with a heap of red roses

beside her on the seat of the motor.

Somehow, that it was all so pretty made it sadder. In the bright street

I thought: To go back to that, when one has so much, when one has

everything in the world, and is young and full of radiant life.

His wife and I looked at each other.

He smiled down at her, as if it were only for her one need be sorry.

"We have had six perfect days," he said, "and you know it must be--the

others are there."

I have written those words many times over. But they are the words one

hears every day. As the men go back, each one of them from the however

different circumstances of his life, that is all they seem to find to

say about it. It does not make a fine phrase, but it has come to mean

for me a beautiful thing. Behind the great sweep of battles it is one

of the things I shall always be glad to have known.

I find myself wanting to put each saying of it away with other memories

in this book that for two years has kept me company.

Two years ago--so long ago that I find myself saying, once upon a

time--there was a small square tower room that had three windows,

narrow and deep-set, the loopholes of ancient defences. Once upon a

time the three windows stood open to the night and the garden, and to

a sense, somehow, of the friendly crowding up of the little town about

the rampart walls, and to the country lying away beyond, sweet in the

dark with forest and field.

I know that where war has passed strangers can look into broken houses

and see all that was intimate and small and dear betrayed with ruin

of stones and lives, and that, like that, people who do not care may

glance in passing into the wreck of the north tower room.

The tower had stood for so long, keeping watch over that road to

Paris--how strange to think it will keep watch no more! It had looked

down, in its long time, on much of war, and held its own through three

besiegings--and now it is fallen.

Now it is fallen, the strong tower, in a land that is laid waste, from

which peace has been taken away, and joy, out of the plentiful fields.

Already that night was passed beyond the end of the world.

In the morning of that day, the morning of that last Sunday of peace,

I had stood in my window over the garden and seen the sunshine, thick

and golden after rain, on wet sweet things, lawns and little formal

stately paths and box edges and clipped yews, roses and heliotrope and

petunias. And I had not known. I had seen the close, soft dream-sky of

France full of white clouds above the tops of trees that were green and

golden, or sometimes as dark as purple and black. And I had not known.

The white peacocks were spreading their dreams of tails below the

terrace, between the crouching sphynxes that years and years of moss

and ivy and rose-vines had grown over.

There had been church bells ringing to the voices of the garden, its

birds and bees and grasshoppers. And I had not known.

Against the rampart walls I could see, between the trees, the town

roofs gathered close, rust-red ancient tiles and thatch that time and

weathers had made beautiful, and crooked chimney-pots and blue smoke

rising straight and high in the still, blue air.

I could hear the little sounds of the village, together with the garden

sounds and the bells.

I could smell hearth fires and fresh-baked bread, together with the

new-cut grass and heliotrope and roses.

Every sound had been part of the stillness; all the lines and colours

of things belonged together in that soft harmony which is so especially

of France. I had thought, how it was France! And I had not known.

I had gone to Mass in the little ancient, dusky church of the village.

I had gone down across the parterres, and along the avenue of limes,

through the summer woods that were so happy and alive, out at the

little green gate in the rampart walls, and down the street of big

square old cobbles, between the nestling houses.

And in the church there had been incense and candles, and the white

caps of old women, and the wriggling of the children in their Sunday

clothes.

When I came back, there were the papers arrived from Paris. And nothing

again was ever, ever, to be the same.

That night, not knowing why, I wanted to write down for my own memory

notes of just those little things that seem so small, and that went all

together to the making of a mood we can no more find to turn to.

I wanted to write of the fragrance of delicate years that abode

in my tower room; of the dim, cloudy mirror over the mantel that

had reflected so many stories; of how the writing-table stood in

the north window, and had nothing but a bowl of sweet-peas and my

travelling-desk things on it; and that the window was open, and how

all the wet, sweet, quite cold night came in; and that, over the tops

of the dark trees, and between the dark cloud masses, I could see all

the stars of the Lyre, Vega, blue-white, very big and near, all more

brilliant, I thought, than ever I had known them before. I wanted to

explain how, somehow, one felt the village, down under the rampart

walls, though it slept and made no sound, and how friendly its presence

was as it lay so close, protecting and protected, about its ancient

burg.

Now the houses are roofless, and the rampart walls are broken. The

tower is fallen. Nothing is left unchanged there, to-night, but the

shining down of the August stars.

I had dreamed of the hoofbeats of galloping horses and crash of great

wheels and of thunder. And all that came, and does not cease. I had

dreamed of blood on the castle stairs, dripping and dripping. And they

say that there was one night especially, when the castle was so full

of wounded men, that there was nowhere left to lay them in any of the

rooms, or in the lower halls. They carried them as they were brought in

up the stairs to lie on the floor of the Long Gallery. And the blood

ran down the stairs.

There was fighting, over and over, up and down, those big square

cobbles of the streets and of the market place, and from the doors and

windows and roofs of those little houses.

The people of the streets and houses are gone, who knows where, with

their poor small bundles, fled long ago, before the hoofbeats and

wheels and thunder.

Across these things, how absurd to remember the sweet-peas there were,

that Sunday night, in a bowl on a writing-table!

It was very hot in the ward to-day; the flies buzzed horridly up and

down the window-panes.

It was a very bad day in the ward. Thirty-four was very low. He had

a hæmorrhage yesterday, and all day he seemed to be sinking. It was

to-day he received his Croix de Guerre. The captain came up to the ward

with another officer and gave it to him, and read his citation out,

standing by the bed. But he seemed scarcely to know.

Several other decorations were given also to-day, downstairs in the

Salle de Jeu. We had much to do in our ward, and I could not go down.

Our little 17 received his Cross and also his Military medal. He

managed to get downstairs and stand up with the others, most of them

like himself on crutches. Yesterday he had news of his mother's death.

He told me he had never had a father. "Il du être un salaud, ce

type-là," he told me. His only brother had been reported missing since

more than a year. He kept calling me over every few minutes--when he

was back in the ward, and in his bed, very tired--to show me his medals

in their two green boxes. He had no one of his own to whom to show them.

There was much big work to be done, and the ward was so clouded all

day with the choking blue smoke of iodine from the hot washings and

dressings.

Madame Marthe was very nervous, and Madame Alice seemed especially

sullen.

I wondered--was it that her poor little Jeanjean is worse again, there,

where he has been all these months, in the children's hospital, cared

for by others than she?

I was thinking all the day of it, and never dared to ask her.

Madame Marthe stood all day by the bed of 34. She would say to him,

"Now breathe, breathe. Now breathe." If ever she stopped saying it,

for one instant, he stopped breathing. It was as if the only thing he

understood was that he must obey her.

Madame Alice did all she possibly could of her work for her, sullenly,

together with her own hard work.

It was a very bad day; I am proud to belong in such days.

I was thinking very much of the garden of the sphynxes and white

peacocks, that is in ruin, and of the tower room given over to bats and

swallows.

It was beautiful, that mood which is gone, but this is more beautiful.

Transcriber's Notes

Obvious errors of punctuation and diacritics repaired.

Inconsistent hyphenation fixed.

P. 23: may loose those memories -> may lose those memories.

P. 32: next the carriage of the British officers -> next to the

carriage of the British officers.

P. 105: the slates over beds -> the slates over the beds.

P. 118: rafia grasses -> raffia grasses.

P. 162: trror of thinking -> terror of thinking.

P. 228: Cousin Thérèse -> Cousine Thérèse.

P. 247: stange things -> strange things.