profane the dead.
Ah, what grief it was when the sergeant said: “Do try to take one or two
more in! It is a pity to drag these poor chaps about from one ambulance
to another. The Val-de-Grâce is full.”
“Very well, I will take two more,” I would say, and then I wondered
where we should put them. We had to give up our own beds, and in this
way the poor fellows were saved. Ever since January 1 we had all three
been sleeping every night at the ambulance. We had some loose dressing-
gowns of thick grey flannel, not unlike the soldiers’ cloaks. The first
of us who heard a cry or a groan sprang out of bed, and if necessary
called the other two.
On January 10, Madame Guérard and I were sitting up at night, on one of
the lounges in the green-room, awaiting the dismal cry of “Ambulance!”
There had been a fierce affray at Clamart, and we knew there would be
many wounded. I was telling her of my fear that the bombs which had
already reached the Museum, the Sorbonne, the Salpétrière, the Val-de-
Grâce, &c., would fall on the Odéon.
“Oh, but, my dear Sarah,” said the sweet woman, “the ambulance flag is
waving so high above it that there could be no mistake. If it were
struck it would be purposely, and that would be abominable.”
“But, Guérard,” I replied, “why should you expect these execrable
enemies of ours to be better than we are ourselves? Did we not behave
like savages at Berlin in 1806?”
“But at Paris there are such admirable public monuments,” she urged.
“Well, and was not Moscow full of masterpieces? The Kremlin is one of
the finest buildings in the world. That did not prevent us giving that
admirable city up to pillage. Oh no, my poor _petit Dame_, do not
deceive yourself. Armies may be Russian, German, French, or Spanish, but
they _are_ armies—that is, they are beings which form an impersonal
‘whole,’ a ‘whole’ that is ferocious and irresponsible. The Germans will
bombard the whole of Paris if the possibility of doing so should be
offered them. You must make up your mind to that, my dear Guérard——”
[Illustration:
SARAH BERNHARDT
_From the portrait in the Théâtre Français_
]
I had not finished my sentence when a terrible detonation roused the
whole neighbourhood from its slumbers. Madame Guérard and I had been
seated opposite each other. We found ourselves standing up close
together in the middle of the room, terrified. My poor cook, her face
quite white, came to me for safety. The detonations continued rather
frequently. The bombarding had commenced from our side that night. I
went round to the wounded men, but they did not seem to be much
disturbed. Only one, a boy of fifteen, whom we had surnamed “pink baby,”
was sitting up in bed. When I went to him to soothe him he showed me his
little medal of the Holy Virgin.
“It is thanks to her that I was not killed,” he said. “If they would put
the Holy Virgin on the ramparts of Paris the bombs would not come.”
He lay down again then, holding his little medal in his hand, and the
bombarding continued until six in the morning. “Ambulance! Ambulance!”
we then heard, and Madame Guérard and I went down. “Here,” said the
sergeant, “take this man. He is losing all his blood, and if I take him
any farther he will not arrive living.” The wounded man was put on the
litter, but as he was German, I asked the sub-officer to take all his
papers and hand them in at the Ministry. We gave the man the place of
one of the convalescents, whom I installed elsewhere. I asked him his
name, and he told me that it was Frantz Mayer, and that he was a soldier
of the Silesian Landwehr. He then fainted from weakness caused by loss
of blood. But he soon came to himself again with our care, and I then
asked him whether he wanted anything, but he did not answer a word. I
supposed that he did not speak French, and, as there was no one at the
ambulance who spoke German, I waited until the next day to send for some
one who knew his language. I must own that the poor man was not welcomed
by his dormitory companions. A soldier named Fortin, who was twenty-
three years of age and a veritable child of Paris, a comical fellow,
mischievous, droll, and good-natured, never ceased railing against the
young German, who on his side never flinched. I went several times to
Fortin and begged him to be quiet, but it was all in vain. Every fresh
outbreak of his was greeted with wild laughter, and his success put him
into the gayest of humours, so that he continued, getting more and more
excited. The others were prevented from sleeping, and he moved about
wildly in his bed, bursting out into abusive language when too abrupt a
movement intensified his suffering. The unfortunate fellow had had his
sciatic nerve torn by a bullet, and he had to endure the most atrocious
pain.
After my third fruitless appeal for silence I ordered the two men
attendants to carry him into a room where he would be alone. He sent for
me, and when I went to him promised to behave well all night long. I
therefore countermanded the order I had given, and he kept his word. The
following day I had Frantz Mayer carried into a room where there was a
young Breton who had had his skull fractured by the bursting of a shell,
and therefore needed the utmost tranquillity.
One of my friends, who spoke German very well, came to see whether the
Silesian wanted anything. The wounded man’s face lighted up on hearing
his own language, and then, turning to me, he said:
“I understand French quite well, Madame, and if I listened calmly to the
horrors poured forth by your French soldier it was because I know that
you cannot hold out two days longer, and I can understand his
exasperation.”
“And why do you think that we cannot hold out?”
“Because I know that you are reduced to eating rats.”
Dr. Duchesne had just arrived, and he was dressing the horrible wound
which the patient had in his thigh.
“Well,” he said, “my friend, as soon as your fever has decreased you
shall eat an excellent wing of chicken.” The German shrugged his
shoulders, and the doctor continued, “Meanwhile drink this, and tell me
what you think of it.”
Dr. Duchesne gave him a glass of water, with a little of the excellent
cognac which the Prefect had sent me. That was the only _tisane_ that my
soldiers took. The Silesian said no more, but he put on the reserved,
circumspect manner of people who know and will not speak.
The bombardment continued, and the ambulance flag certainly served as a
target for our enemies, for they fired with surprising exactitude, and
altered their firing directly a bomb fell any distance from the
neighbourhood of the Luxembourg. Thanks to this, we had more than twelve
bombs one night. These dismal shells, when they burst in the air, were
like the fireworks at a _fête_. The shining splinters then fell down,
black and deadly. Georges Boyer, who at that time was a young
journalist, came to call on me at the ambulance, and I told him about
the terrifying splendours of the night.
“Oh, how much I should like to see all that!” he said.
“Come this evening, towards nine or ten o’clock, and you will see,” I
replied.
We spent several hours at the little round window of my dressing-room,
which looked out towards Châtillon. It was from there that the Germans
fired the most.
We listened, in the silence of the night, to the muffled sounds coming
from yonder; there would be a light, a formidable noise in the distance,
and the bomb arrived, falling in front of us or behind, bursting either
in the air or on reaching its goal. Once we had only just time to draw
back quickly, and even then the disturbance in the atmosphere affected
us so violently that for a second we were under the impression that we
had been struck.
The shell had fallen just underneath my dressing-room, grazing the
cornice, which it dragged down in its fall to the ground, where it burst
feebly. But what was our amazement to see a little crowd of children
swoop down on the burning pieces, just like a lot of sparrows on fresh
manure when the carriage has passed! The little vagabonds were
quarrelling over the _débris_ of these engines of warfare. I wondered
what they could possibly do with them.
“Oh, there is not much mystery about it,” said Boyer; “these little
starving urchins will sell them.”
This proved to be true. One of the men attendants, whom I sent to find
out, brought back with him a child of about ten years old.
“What are you going to do with that, my little man?” I asked him,
picking up the piece of shell, which was warm and still dangerous, on
the edge where it had burst.
“I am going to sell it,” he replied.
“What for?”
“To buy my turn in the _queue_ when the meat is being distributed.”
“But you risk your life, my poor child. Sometimes the shells come
quickly, one after the other. Where were you when this one fell?”
“Lying down on the stone of the wall that supports the iron railings.”
He pointed across to the Luxembourg Gardens, opposite the stage entrance
to the Odéon.
We bought up all the _débris_ that the child had, without attempting to
give him advice which might have sounded wise. What was the use of
preaching wisdom to this poor little creature, who heard of nothing but
massacres, fire, revenge, retaliation, and all the rest of it, for the
sake of honour, for the sake of religion, for the sake of right?
Besides, how was it possible to keep out of the way? All the people
living in the Faubourg St. Germain were liable to be blown to pieces, as
the enemy very luckily could only bombard Paris on that side, and not at
every point. No; we were certainly in the most dangerous neighbourhood.
One day Baron Larrey came to see Frantz Mayer, who was very ill. He
wrote a prescription which a young errand boy was told to wait for and
bring back very, very quickly. As the boy was rather given to loitering,
I went to the window. His name was Victor, but we called him “Toto.” The
druggist lived at the corner of the Place Medicis. It was then six
o’clock in the evening. Toto looked up, and on seeing me he began to
laugh and jump as he hurried to the druggist’s. He had only five or six
more yards to go, and as he turned round to look up at my window I
clapped my hands and called out, “Good! Be quick back!” Alas! Before the
poor boy could open his mouth to reply he was cut in two by a shell
which had just fallen. It did not burst, but bounced a yard high, and
then struck poor Toto right in the middle of the chest. I uttered such a
shriek that every one came rushing to me. I could not speak, but pushed
every one aside and rushed downstairs, beckoning for some one to come
with me. “A litter”—“the boy”—“the druggist”—I managed to articulate.
Ah, what a horror, what an awful horror! When we reached the poor child
his intestines were all over the ground, his chest and his poor little
red chubby face had the flesh entirely taken off. He had neither eyes,
nose, nor mouth; nothing, nothing but some hair at the end of a
shapeless, bleeding mass, a yard away from his head. It was as though a
tiger had torn open the body with its claws and emptied it with fury and
a refinement of cruelty, leaving nothing but the poor little skeleton.
Baron Larrey, who was the best of men, turned slightly pale at this
sight. He saw plenty such, certainly, but this poor little fellow was a
quite useless holocaust. Ah, the injustice, the infamy of war! Will the
much dreamed of time never come when wars are no longer possible; when
the monarch who wants war will be dethroned and imprisoned as a
malefactor? Will the time never come when there will be a cosmopolitan
council, where a wise man of every country will represent his nation,
and where the rights of humanity will be discussed and respected? So
many men think as I do, so many women talk as I do, and yet nothing is
done. The pusillanimity of an Oriental, the ill humour of a sovereign,
may still bring thousands of men face to face. And there will still be
men who are so learned, chemists who spend their time in dreaming about,
and inventing a powder to blow everything up, bombs that will wound
twenty or thirty men, guns repeating their deadly task until the bullets
fall, spent themselves, after having torn open ten or twelve human
breasts.
A man whom I liked very much was busy experimenting how to steer
balloons. To achieve that means a realisation of my dream, namely, to
fly in the air, to approach the sky, and have under one’s feet the
moist, down-like clouds. Ah, how interested I was in my friend’s
researches! One day, though, he came to me very much excited with a new
discovery.
“I have discovered something about which I am wild with delight!” he
said. He then began to explain to me that his balloon would be able to
carry inflammable matter without the least danger, thanks to this and
thanks to that.
“But what for?” I asked, bewildered by his explanations and half crazy
with so many technical words.
“What for?” he repeated; “why, for war!” he replied. “We shall be able
to fire and to throw terrible bombs to a distance of a thousand, twelve
hundred, and even fifteen hundred yards, and it would be impossible for
us to be harmed at such a distance. My balloons, thanks to a substance
which is my invention, with which the covering would be coated, would
have nothing to fear from fire nor yet from gas.”
“I do not want to know anything more about you or your invention,” I
said, interrupting him brusquely. “I thought you were a humane savant,
and you are a wild beast. Your researches were in connection with the
most beautiful manifestation of human genius, with those evolutions in
the sky which I loved so dearly. You want now to transform these into
cowardly attacks turned against the earth. You horrify me! Do go!”
With this I left my friend to himself and his cruel invention, ashamed
for a moment. His efforts have not succeeded, though, according to his
wishes.
The remains of the poor lad were put into a small coffin, and Madame
Guérard and I followed the pauper’s hearse to the grave. The morning was
so cold that the driver had to stop and take a glass of hot wine, as
otherwise he might have died of congestion. We were alone in the
carriage, for the boy had been brought up by his grandmother, who could
not walk at all, and who knitted vests and stockings. It was through
going to order some vests and socks for my men that I had made the
acquaintance of Mère Tricottin, as she was called. At her request I had
engaged her grandson, Victor Durieux, as an errand boy, and the poor old
woman had been so grateful that I dared not go now to tell her of his
death.
Madame Guérard went for me to the Rue de Vaugirard, where the old woman
lived. As soon as she arrived the poor grandmother could see by her sad
face that something had happened.
“_Bon Dieu_, my dear Madame, is the poor little thin lady dead?” This
referred to me. Madame Guérard then told her, as gently as possible, the
sad news. The old woman took off her spectacles, looked at her visitor,
wiped them, and put them on her nose again. She then began to grumble
violently about her son, the father of the dead boy. He had taken up
with some low girl, by whom he had had this child, and she had always
foreseen that misfortune would come upon them through it.
She continued in this strain, not sorrowing for the poor boy, but
abusing her son, who was a soldier in the Army of the Loire.
Although the grandmother seemed to feel so little grief, I went to see
her after the funeral.
“It is all over, Madame Durieux,” I said. “But I have secured the grave
for a period of five years for the poor boy.”
She turned towards me, quite comic in her vexation.
“What madness!” she exclaimed. “Now that he’s with the _bon Dieu_ he
won’t want for anything. It would have been better to have taken a bit
of land that would have brought something in. Dead folks don’t make
vegetables grow.”
This outburst was so terribly logical that, in spite of the odious
brutality of it, I yielded to Mère Tricottin’s desire, and gave her the
same present I had given to the boy. They should each have their bit of
land. The child, who had had a right to a longer life, should sleep his
eternal sleep in his, whilst the old woman could wrest from hers the
remainder of her life, for which death was lying in wait.
I returned to the ambulance, sad and unnerved. A joyful surprise was
awaiting me. A friend of mine was there, holding in his hand a very
small piece of tissue paper, on which were the following two lines in my
mother’s handwriting: “We are all very well, and at Homburg.” I was
furious on reading this. At Homburg? All my family at Homburg, settling
down tranquilly in the enemy’s country. I racked my brains to think by
what extraordinary combination my mother had gone to Homburg. I knew
that my pretty Aunt Rosine had a lady friend there, with whom she stayed
every year, for she always spent two months at Homburg, two at Baden-
Baden, and one month at Spa, as she was the greatest gambler that the
_bon Dieu_ ever created. Anyhow, those who were so dear to me were all
well, and that was the important point. But I was nevertheless annoyed
with my mother for going to Homburg.
I heartily thanked the friend who had brought me the little slip of
paper. It was sent to me by the American Minister, who had put himself
to no end of trouble in order to give help and consolation to the
Parisians. I then gave him a few lines for my mother, in case he might
be able to send them to her.
The bombardment of Paris continued. One night the brothers from the
Ecole Chrétienne came to ask us for conveyances and help, in order to
collect the dead on the Châtillon Plateau. I let them have my two
conveyances, and I went with them to the battle-field. Ah, what a
terrible memory! It was like a scene from Dante! It was an icy cold
night, and we could scarcely move along. Finally, by the light of
torches and lanterns, we saw that we had arrived. I got out of the
vehicle with the infirmary attendant and his assistant. We had to move
slowly, as at every step we trod upon the dying or the dead. We passed
along murmuring, “Ambulance! Ambulance!” When we heard a groan we turned
our steps in the direction whence it came. Ah, the first man that I
found in this way! He was half lying down, his body supported by a heap
of dead. I raised my lantern to look at his face, and found that his ear
and part of his jaw had been blown off. Great clots of blood, coagulated
by the cold, hung from his lower jaw. There was a wild look in his eyes.
I took a wisp of straw, dipped it in my flask, drew up a few drops of
brandy, and blew them into the poor fellow’s mouth between his teeth. I
repeated this three or four times. A little life then came back to him,
and we took him away in one of the vehicles. The same thing was done for
the others. Some of them could drink from the flask, which made our work
shorter. One of these unfortunate men was frightful to look at. A shell
had taken all the clothes from the upper part of his body, with the
exception of two ragged sleeves, which hung from the arms at the
shoulders. There was no trace of a wound, but his poor body was marked
all over with great black patches, and the blood was oozing slowly from
the corners of his mouth. I went nearer to him, for it seemed to me that
he was breathing. I had a few drops of the vivifying cordial given to
him, and he then half opened his eyes and said, “Thank you.” He was
lifted into the conveyance, but the poor fellow died from an attack of
hæmorrhage, covering all the other wounded men with a stream of dark
blood.
Daylight gradually began to appear, a misty, dull dawn. The lanterns had
burnt out, but we could now distinguish each other. There were about a
hundred persons there: sisters of charity, military and civil male
hospital attendants, the brothers from the Ecole Chrétienne, other
priests, and a few ladies who, like myself, had given themselves up
heart and soul to the service of the wounded.
The sight was still more dismal by daylight, for all that the night had
hidden in the shadows appeared then in the tardy, wan light of that
January morning.
There were so many wounded that it was impossible to transport them all,
and I sobbed at the thought of my helplessness. Other vehicles kept
arriving, but there were so many wounded, so very many. A number of
those who had only slight wounds had died of cold.
On returning to the ambulance I met one of my friends at the door. He
was a naval officer, and he had brought me a sailor who had been wounded
at the fort of Ivry. He had been shot below the right eye. He was
entered as Désiré Bloas, boatswain’s mate, age 27. He was a magnificent
fellow, very frank looking, and a man of few words. As soon as he was in
bed, Dr. Duchesne sent for a barber to shave him, as his bushy whiskers
had been ravaged by a bullet that had lodged itself in the salivary
gland, carrying with it hair and flesh into the wound. The surgeon took
up his pincers to extract the pieces of flesh which had stopped up the
opening of the wound. He then had to take some very fine pincers to
extract the hairs which had been forced in. When the barber laid his
razor very gently near the wound, the unfortunate man turned livid and
an oath escaped his lips. He immediately glanced at me and muttered,
“Pardon, Mademoiselle.” I was very young, but I appeared much younger
than my age; I looked like a very young girl, in fact. I was holding the
poor fellow’s hand in mine and trying to comfort him with the hundreds
of consoling words that spring from a woman’s heart to her lips when she
has to soothe moral or physical suffering.
“Ah, Mademoiselle,” said poor Bloas, when the wound was finally dressed,
“you gave me courage.”
When he was more at his ease I asked him if he would like something to
eat.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Well, my boy, would you like cheese, soup, or sweets?” asked Madame
Lambquin.
“Sweets,” replied the powerful-looking fellow, smiling.
Désiré Bloas often talked to me about his mother, who lived near Brest.
He had a veritable adoration for this mother, but he seemed to have a
terrible grudge against his father, for one day, when I asked him
whether his father was still living, he looked up with his fearless eyes
and appeared to fix them on a being only visible to himself, as though
challenging him, with an expression of the most pitiful contempt. Alas!
the brave fellow was destined to a cruel end, but I will return to that
later.
The sufferings endured through the siege began to have their effect on
the _morale_ of the Parisians. Bread had just been rationed out: there
were to be 300 grammes for adults and 150 grammes for children. A silent
fury took possession of the people at this news. Women were the most
courageous, the men were excited. Quarrels grew bitter, for some wanted
war to the very death, and others wanted peace.
One day when I entered Frantz Mayer’s room to take him his meal, he went
into the most ridiculous rage. He threw his piece of chicken down on the
ground, and declared that he would not eat anything, nothing more at
all, for they had deceived him by telling him that the Parisians had not
enough food to last two days before surrendering, and he had been in the
ambulance seventeen days now, and was having chicken. What the poor
fellow did not know was that I had bought about forty chickens and six
geese at the beginning of the siege, and I was feeding them up in my
dressing-room in the Rue de Rome. Oh, my dressing-room was very pretty
just then; but I let Frantz believe that all Paris was full of chickens,
ducks, geese, and other domestic bipeds.
The bombardment continued, and one night I had to have all my patients
transported to the Odéon cellars, for when Madame Guérard was helping
one of the sick men to get back into bed, a shell fell on the bed
itself, between her and the officer. It makes me shudder even now to
think that three minutes sooner the unfortunate man would have been
killed as he lay in bed, although the shell did not burst.
We could not stay long in the cellars. The water was getting deeper in
them, and rats tormented us. I therefore decided that the ambulance must
be moved, and I had the worst of the patients conveyed to the Val-de-
Grâce Hospital. I kept about twenty men who were on the road to
convalescence. I rented an immense empty flat for them at 58 Rue
Taitbout, and it was there that we awaited the armistice.
I was half dead with anxiety, as I had had no news from my own family
for a long time. I could not sleep, and had become the very shadow of my
former self.