Then when the men had gone there came that anxious silence in which
every ear was strained to catch the first cry from the army. Would it
be victory or defeat? In the strength of her new-born spirit France was
ready for either fate. The streets of Paris were darkened; the theatres
were shut up; the cafés were ordered to close at nine o’clock; the sale
of absinthe was prohibited that Frenchmen might have every faculty alert
to meet their destiny; and the principal hotels were transformed into
hospitals for the wounded that would surely come.
They came. We were allowed to see their coming, and in those early days
of the war, before the Red Cross companies had got properly to work,
the return of the first of the fallen among the French soldiery made a
terrible spectacle. At suburban stations, generally in the middle of
the night, long lines of third-class railway carriages, as well as
rectangular, box-shaped cattle wagons, such as in conscript countries
are used for purposes of mobilization, would draw up out of the
darkness.
Instantly hundreds of pale, wasted, generally bearded, and often wounded
faces would appear at the windows, crying out for coffee or chocolate.
Then the cattle wagons would be unbolted, and the great doors thrown
back, disclosing six or eight men in each, lying outstretched on straw,
with their limbs swathed in blood-stained bandages, and their eyes
glazed with pain. They were the brave fellows who, a few weeks before,
had gone to Flanders in the pride and prime of their strength. In some
cases they had lain like that for two whole days on their long way back
from the fighting line, with no one to give them meat or drink, with
nothing to see in the darkness of their moving tomb and nothing to hear,
except the grinding of the iron wheels beneath them, and the cries of
the comrades by their side.
“Mon Dieu! Que de souffrances! Qui l’aurait cru possible? O mon Dieu,
aie pitié de moi.”