Odette observed that the patients gazed at her without once turning away

their eyes. She won their approval by the first words she uttered, and

by the gentleness with which she washed the faces of two or three

helpless men, and she saw their expressions change. Those eyes so full

of agony, which make unpractised fingers tremble, were softened. Her

hands were dexterous, her face attractive. There was one poor fellow

whom she had to wash from head to foot, like a new-born baby, a

difficult task for a beginner. When all was finished and he was wrapped

in clean linen she was about to pass to another bed, when the patient

said: "Wait, madame!" And she saw him painfully turn in his bed, raise

his sheet, awkwardly stretch out a suffering arm in the attempt at any

cost to reach the case that hung at the head of the bed. She held the

linen bag within his reach, and he, hesitating, fumbling, blindly

feeling among a litter of things, a knife, letters, bits of bread,

succeeded in extracting two photographs, those of his wife and his two

little children. He desired to reward the new nurse for her kind

offices, and he did his best by introducing her to his little family.

Deeply touched, Odette praised the wife and the two children, and

thenceforward the poor fellow was her friend.

Mme. de Calouas came to say that the stretcher-bearers were coming to

carry "the thigh" to be dressed. Odette followed "the thigh." The new

nurse was asked to cut the dressing. She broke into a cold perspiration;

she thought the scissors were defective, and her remark provoked a smile

from all the experts around; only the patient looked at her with an

apprehension which seemed to paralyze her.

"You must learn to cut dressings," said Mme. de Calouas. "You will get

used to it; just a knack."

Finally the steel succeeded in biting through the damp compresses. When

they fell apart the wound appeared. It was an open fracture of the leg,

whence exhaled the special sickening smell of osseous pus. The large

wound spread open like a nightmare flower with thick petals, soft and

viscid, covered with a creamy layer of dull old-rose color. They washed

it; the patient gritted his teeth; now and again a cry escaped from the

thin little brown face. When they looked at him he was brave enough to

smile and say, "That's all right."

Odette was more ill than the wounded man. As on the previous evening,

she asked that she might go out into the air, and when she stumbled at

the door, turned pale, and was about to faint, the orderly, who

understood these phenomena, with the help of a valid patient laid her

all along upon a marble slab. It was only for a moment, and she returned

to the room, saying, like the wounded man: "That's all right." The

uninterrupted process of dressing made even her forget the incident. A

kindly woman drew her into an embrasure and gave her a drop of cordial.

At that moment a man was being carried to the operating-room. He

blustered a little as he addressed to his comrades the classic _au

revoir_ which may so well be an _adieu_: "I am going to my game of

billiards!"

"Try to win, old fellow," they answered from all parts of the ward.

And, without flinching, Odette was present at "her" first operation.

She returned home at half past twelve, exhausted, but lighter in heart

and satisfied with herself.

"Madame is pale," said Amelia. "Madame is the color of the lamp-shade

when the lamp is lighted."

After luncheon she slept heavily for half an hour, and returned to the

hospital. The afternoon was more calm, at least until the second visit

of the head physician, before the men's six-o'clock meal. She made

further acquaintance with her patients; she heard them talk about the

war. She found occasion to say, "My poor husband was killed on the 22d

of September," but it produced no great effect, none of those soldiers

having known Lieutenant Jacquelin. Each told about what he had seen, and

nothing else seemed to him to have a real existence. She was

disappointed, but by their various touching stories of what they had

been through, she was introduced to that war of which she had determined

to know nothing since her husband was dead. The battles of the Yser, the

sufferings of the combatants who had passed day after day in freezing

water, the grotesque onslaughts of the Germans, the piles of dead under

the ominous skies, set her imagination to work. Always thinking of her

husband, she saw him all alone in the face of those infuriated enemies,

trampled down by them.... He had gone out with drawn sabre from his

little village, at the head of his company, and he had been killed

outright. Before the survivors of the Yser she no longer dared speak of

the circumstance of the lieutenant's death, beautiful though it was.

This war seemed to be enlarging, growing beyond measure great.

They were beginning to organize the hospital for the winter; certain

persons insisted that the war would not be over in six months; others

said with conviction: "Nor in eighteen months either!" But these were

suspected of sowing demoralization. Yet the English were making

preparations for three years! From her friend La Villaumer, who was

still in Paris, Odette received letters in which he wrote:

"We are like children, sometimes gay, laughing and gamboling, at others

howling, no one knows why. My dear friend, busy yourself with your work,

and don't read the papers. As for me, there is something which impresses

me more than the monstrous movements of the German colossus: it is the

soul of the colossus. It is _one_; it has only one purpose, which is the

greatness of the German nation. It is a rudimentary sentiment, savage,

primitive, barbarous, but how strong! We ourselves are fighting because

we have been attacked, and also to defend ideas which do us the greatest

honor: liberty, justice, and the like. We are animated by a very lively

sentiment of the rights of man. We love humanity; they, the Germans,

love Germany. How much more simple it is, and how it relieves them of

all the scruples that hold us back! And yet, in the final issue, it is

he who shall have triumphed by force who will lay down the moral values

of the future."

Thus, uncertainty, admiration, confidence, scepticism, and a state of

alarm were concurrently implanted in minds, and Odette, affected by

them, like every one else, began from that day to be infected, as with

the odor of the hospital, with this irritating compound.

Little by little it seemed to her that she no longer upheld herself, but

that she let herself be carried away, borne along and guided by the life

of the hospital. It was at once horrible and almost laughable. A place

of pain, the perpetual reminder of enormities which the human brain

could never have conceived, it was also an assemblage dominated by

youth, which saves all. In the gaze of those prostrate wounded, gaze

which had become of so much importance to her who passed and repassed

along the bedsides, burned a flame disturbing and alluring, result of

the burning away of something that could not be named. At times, one

felt as if in certain of those wounded men one saw beings returned from

the beyond. They had seen what nothing had prepared them to see,

something that confused them, both their senses and their judgment. Some

of them said: "It was hell!" Others, much more simple-minded, merely said:

"One must have been there!" Certain of them, without imagination or

memory, living entirely in the present moment, shut up within themselves

an unconscious gravity which was in strange contrast with their youthful

natures. But in a general way a new nurse like Odette could aver:

"But the wounded are not sad!"

"Because," some one would reply, "they are all happy at not being dead."

Thus, day succeeded day, without softening Odette's personal sorrow, but

as if shrouding it behind a mourning veil which covered all that she

could imagine of earth's surface. Everything made her think of Jean, but

she had not time to appear to be thinking of him, and she shrank from

speaking of him.

She led a very active life. It would happen that just as she sat down at

table, all alone in the evening in the Elizabeth pavilion, the door-bell

would ring. It would be one of the volunteer employees, passing along on

his bicycle to notify the nurses that a train of one hundred and twenty

wounded men was announced to reach the station at eleven o'clock. By

half past ten Odette, who would not take a nap, and who knew not what to

do at home, was already at the hospital, in her cap and blouse. The more

zealous ones were there, and the more indolent ones as well, welcoming

the opportunity to get together and gossip. The head physician was

coming and going, opening and shutting doors; the doctors were arriving

one by one; the surgeon, all in white, his sleeves turned back to the

elbows, was talking with the women. The telephone-bell rang; it was the

police commissioner sending word that the train was an hour late. A few

persons were in despair; there were some whom the matter moved to

laughter. Every one waited. And sometimes the train, instead of one

hour, was two or three hours late. Resignation became general in

proportion as reasons for impatience accumulated. In the great hall

where they were all assembled some seated themselves on anything they

could find, others lay down upon stretchers. Bright conversation grew

dim with the lights. White-robed women, going up or down stairs on

tiptoe, seemed like angelic apparitions. Through the partitions came the

heavy breathing of sleeping men. Suddenly the ringing of a bell startled

every one; the train was drawing into the station at last. The lights

were turned up. Ten minutes later the first automobiles were sounding in

the court. The double-leaved doors were thrown wide, notwithstanding the

cold, the stretcher-bearers rushed out, and in a moment, contrasting

with their rapid bounds, came slowly the wounded soldiers, bleeding,

bearded, covered with earth, wan, exhausted; some of them half-naked,

some with frozen feet, upheld or carried by sturdy fifteen-year-old

lads. All were silent, a religious respect hushed the words upon the

lips. This torn flesh, these rags of French uniform, wrought in the mind

of every being not utterly insensible a change in his idea of the

pathetic; something of the atmosphere of the firing-line entered and

asepticized every heart.

The next morning the sense of familiarity returned. But in that one hour

of the dark winter night, while the surgeon, bending over each victim,

was asking him almost tenderly: "And you, my child?"--something august,

an exhalation of the colossal human sacrifice, penetrated into this

commonplace old hotel hall, sanctifying it for all time to come. And not

one of those men or women who had been there, however advanced the hour

of the night, however visible the fatigue on all their faces, but was

glad for having been there.

Whence came these wounded men? From Ypres, from Arras, from Notre-Dame

de Lorette. The names called up all that any one knew, through

newspapers and private talk, of those charnel-houses whose image the

imagination refuses to harbor, upon which those who have escaped from

them keep silence.

Odette, soapy brush in hand, forcing back all repugnance, doing as

others did, was helping to soothe agonies which humanity seems never

before to have known or dreamed of. The most shocking duties no longer

repelled her. The very effort which she was compelled to make, by the

contrast between what she was seeing and doing and what life had

formerly offered her, pressed the character of the catastrophe to her

mind which lacked capacity to conceive of it. "Is it, then, so great?"

she would wonder. And even: "Is there after all anything great?" For no

soul in the world had taught her this. The inevitable contrast with her

past life, all for herself, for her individual satisfaction, seemed to

dishonor her memories, even of happiness, making them almost trivial.

This, indeed, was the opinion of Mme. de Calouas, but not that of

Amelia, whom in her solitude it became sometimes necessary to oppose.

"Madame adopts the ideas of those around her," the maid would say; "it

is all very well, but Madame may believe me: the good time, and the true

time, was before all this, when the poor men were not preparing to be

made into hash."

IX

Who would have believed it a year ago? Odette took the inclination to

follow to the cemetery the pitiful funerals of dead soldiers, not

because it offered her a pretext for a walk into the country in the free

air, for she had done that--she, so susceptible to cold--all through the

black winter. But before everything else she was thinking that she had

not followed her husband to the grave. After all that she had endured,

still reverent of century-old rites, not to have followed the body of

her husband in a funeral car to his last abode seemed to her to have

failed in a sovereign duty. Alas! her husband's body had been carried in

no funeral car, no one had followed him to the grave! She did not permit

herself to dwell upon these heartrending details, but in accompanying

the mortal remains of the soldiers she felt that she was to a certain

degree acquitting herself of an indispensable duty that had not been

rendered to Jean. Then the ceremony at the church moved her. The panoply

of war mingling with hymns and words of peace, the tumult of battle set

over against the sacerdotal acts of the priest, and the prayers for the

eternal rest of the soul that had known to the uttermost the horror of

earthly chaos, combined in some way to deaden the pain of mind, senses,

and heart.

The funeral train would climb the narrow, serpentine road which led to

the old town on the hill. Wounded comrades, hobbling along, their feet

ill defended from the rough ground by straw slippers, some of them

lacking an arm and others an eye, would follow the hearse of the poor,

covered with the tricolor, behind the old parents or the young widow in

tears; then would come delegates from the municipality and the hospital,

then kindly disposed followers, pious people, idlers. The hedges would

be growing green; the farms, with flocks of children at the doors and

lowing cattle, would be awaking from the sleep of the long winter; one

could hear the click of the milk-pail as it was set down upon the

ground, the apple-trees in the fields were great tufts of unsullied

flowers. When the procession, having climbed the hillside, turned toward

the right the town came into view, its hotels and casinos transformed

into hospitals with the floating red cross, its church-towers, its long

white beach, the boundless sea with its line of English transports,

untiringly through all the months, bringing from afar British troops to

the land of France. The whole picture melted away into the national flag

that covered the body of the little soldier, shot through by a ball on

the plains of Picardy. In all this there was a new and incomparable

poetry; the self-sacrifice of a man to something that he hardly

understands, a notable act in which all desired to participate; and by

contract the everlasting unconcern, the utter indifference, of nature.

Every one, without exception, was thinking of the end of the war. It was

an illusion wrought by the spring, the renaissance of all that lives,

the urgent need of peace and happiness that all creatures and plants cry

out for beneath the returning sun. Those behind the hearse shook their

heads, saying: "What a calamity!" But all were thinking: "It will surely

soon be over." They sighed: "My God, grant that this may be the last to

go!" Alas, it was only the first springtide of the war! If a prophetic

voice should have cried: "In the spring of next year, in the spring of

another year, and still of another, this same ceremony will take place,

the same hopes will be uttered, the same illusions cherished! For season

shall follow upon season, year upon year, only the horror and

unhappiness shall be changed, for they shall increase and time shall

know them out of all proportions that are called reasonable"--assuredly

these good people would have been crushed.

As they went down the hill they gathered flowers along the roadside. The

soldiers stopped in the wine-shops where they were given cider, and all

returned to their places at once moved, saddened, and enriched by hopes,

as is always the case when a new victim has succumbed.

Spring passed, and summer, and autumn.

Odette never spoke of her husband's death, though she was always

thinking of it. She had found neither officer nor soldier who had known

him. The death of Lieutenant Jacquelin in the early days of the war was

a disappearance like so many others, in a chain of events that had no

common measure. A man would fall, another man would take his place;

nearly all the officers by profession were dead, and there were officers

still.

"What is a man?" a common soldier asked her one day on the beach.

X

Early in the following spring, when the gardens that surrounded the

villas of Surville were gay with flowering plums, and the countryside

was again covered with those lovely trees of rosy snow that it is a pain

to look at when men are killing one another, when the woods were

venturing to confide to the brisk air their new-born foliage, Odette was

obliged to make a visit to Paris.

During the journey, in company with convalescents and men on furlough,

old men, and women in mourning, she was astonished to find herself so

much attached to the hospital which she had entered almost against her

will, drawn by something which seemed not to belong to her real self.

"Most of the women that I have met there," she reflected, "are of an

unlovely pettiness, and one would say that they strive to transform the

most innocent act into a shameful offense, from a desire to believe that

there are traitors, guilty persons everywhere, and by a strange

inclination to find the presence of the devil in every corner! And yet

their service is excellent." Cunning malice, destructive backbiting,

scandal set on foot by inconsiderate comments on trivial acts, often

meaningless and that might well have been left unnoticed, open jealousy,

absurd vanity, the most insidious intrigues to work up to distinction;

to sum up, utter triviality--all these composed a body of customs

recognized, admitted, in no respect casting a blot upon respectability.

Only one thing led up to the mark of infamy: anything which nearly or

remotely might resemble love.

How surprising this had appeared in the eyes of a Parisian woman of

twenty-seven, who had lived in the world of society during the years

between 1905 and 1914!

Odette mused upon that social circle, young, cheerful, given to sports,

relatively kindly and prosperous, who before the war had surrounded her.

What had become of Simone de Prans, Rose Misson, Clotilde Avvogade,

Germaine Le Gault, and M. de La Villaumer? She had received brief

missives from them, postal-cards rather than letters. On her part, had

Odette perhaps disconcerted her friends by the accounts she sent them;

had she perhaps wearied them by her persistent grief? Simone and Rose

still had their husbands, the former grievously wounded, the other still

whole, running about in his car as usual; Avvogade was attached to Great

Headquarters. Can any one understand the sorrow from which he does not

himself suffer?

On reaching Paris Odette was singularly impressed. When she had gone to

Surville in 1914, to forget the war and think only of her dead, she had

been surprised to find herself on the contrary all the nearer to the

war. The trains of wounded, life among the wounded, the almost sole

society of men but recently escaped from death; all this was far

different from her recluse life in the apartment of the Rue de Balzac,

which had indeed recalled the memory of Jean, but had also recalled the

memory of the time of peace. Monotony of occupation, the continual

living-over of the same emotions, at last dulls the sensibilities. The

war as it appeared to her after eighteen months of hospital experience

was a state of things to which her organism and her thought had become

moulded. The long daily weariness, the constantly renewed effort, dulled

her senses and confused her perception of events.

Paris in March, 1916, seemed to her much more like war than Surville.

The battle of Verdun was at its height, and all Paris was ringing with

its echoes wherever one might be. Newspapers, conversations, the

tramways, the metro, the taxi chauffeur who gave you change, the woman

who sold you a magazine, servants, masters, the rich, the poor, bank

employees, even to the sellers of violets in the streets, all brought to

mind the war and Verdun, yet mutely, less by outcries than by quiet

words, less by words than by changed color, the graying of the hair or

of the beard, faded eyes, new wrinkles, and a certain indefinable

manner. The whole earth and everything that it bears, every creature

moving upon it, were a single sensitiveness, raised to its most acute

degree. Acts and gestures apparently most remote from the war,

receptions, dinners, the crowd at the entrance of the moving-picture

shows, of classical concerts, of the few remaining music-halls, only

showed the necessity for certain temperaments to tear themselves away

from the nightmare of Verdun. Every one was affected by it, and so much

the more as they were forced to tell themselves: "There are those who

are suffering infinitely more than we."

Odette, in her apartment, was once again overwhelmed by her personal

sorrow. She had lived in Surville with her grief buried in the depths of

her heart, for though everything she saw reminded her of Jean she had no

leisure to give herself to dwelling upon the past. In the Rue de Balzac

all her sorrow came to meet her entire as on the first day. It seemed as

if her stay at Surville had done nothing for her. When Simone de Prans

came to welcome her, it seemed to Odette that her friend had just

arrived with the terrible news, and she melted into tears. Her tears

surprised Simone, who dared not reproach her with exaggerating her

sorrow, but who yet brought herself to give her to understand that so

long and so violent a grief was not fitting, that no one any longer wept

like that. Odette, made docile by eighteen months of punctual obedience

to orders, did not resist, made no objection. "No one any longer wept

like that"; it was a custom, one of those sovereign customs, which a

Parisian woman instinctively accepts. Simone had said: "You understand,

there are too many!" Which signified, such misfortunes are too numerous;

they are raining down on everybody. The human heart would not be equal

to its task if it must be always sympathizing; each woman in mourning

would herself die of it, creating a new and superfluous pain. She spoke

with the greatest ease of her Pierrot, one leg paralyzed, one arm five

centimetres shorter than the other and with shattered nerves. He was at

the Ministry of War, and was content. She told of a ceremony which she

had accidentally witnessed that morning, passing the Madeleine on her

way back from the Flower Market. "A fine marriage, you know; red carpet

on the steps, a crowd to right and left. Just as I was passing the doors

opened, and up above I saw the young couple."

"There are still men to marry?"

"Listen; she, who appeared to be pretty, a lovely girl, a brunette,

tall, leaning, as if enamoured, on her husband's arm; he in uniform, his

decorations flashing on his breast. Oh, the handsome fellow, not thirty

years old! He held himself upright, splendid, not looking at his feet;

two large eyes wide open and fixed, as if he were speaking to a

superior. She seemed to be indicating the steps by a gentle pressure of

the arm, that he might not lose an inch of his fine height. Behind them

one could hear the swellings of the great organ. There was an impulse to

applaud, for he was evidently a hero, unmaimed and superb. Every one was

glad in the happiness of his charming wife, though pitying her in the

midst of admiration, for to-morrow her handsome officer must return to

the firing-line, and the war is endless. Suddenly there was a movement

in the crowd, murmurs, whisperings, faces turned pale; the handsome

officer had just missed falling, my dear, notwithstanding the care of

his young wife to hide his infirmity, for he was blind!"

"It's frightful, frightful," exclaimed Odette.

She had seen and nursed most grievously wounded soldiers; but

unconsciously a sort of convention had been established in her mind by

which nothing that she saw, or that happened in the hospital at

Surville, should move her. This first result of the war which had faced

her elsewhere than at Surville, and under another aspect, impressed her

almost intolerably. On the other hand, Simone had become accustomed to

the dramatic scenes which at times occur in Paris, where everything is

perhaps all the more sad because the war drama is close at hand, aping

normal life. This juxtaposition of the manners of a time of peace and

these shadows of the pit which mingle with the life of every day, more

like a prolonged dream than like reality, produce surprising effects

upon reflective minds.

Simone de Prans, who for a time had taken up work in a model hospital,

an American hospital, was no longer a nurse. That was no longer done.

"What about our good Rose?" asked Odette.

"Rose Misson has arranged her life. She has resolved not to yield to

things; she has been too much teased about her old husband, always going

about in his automobile. Neither Rose nor her husband is disturbed by

that; he remains on his seat; she dresses, visits the shops as in former

times and receives the few friends who are not indignant because her

husband has not lost two or three limbs. Between ourselves, I think she

is a woman who is doing a great deal of good."

"Only she does not cry it upon the housetops?"

"No; they will be upbraided for it all their lives, she and her husband;

he, free from all military obligation, for having 'ambushed' himself in

his automobile, she for having retained her placid manner, her good

humor."

"I thought that optimism was in fashion."

"Optimism, yes, but not naturalness. The approved sort of optimism

consists in unendingly predicting victory, with the jaw of a tigress,

and in determinedly transforming all bad news into a presage of success.

But those who maintain a quiet confidence without talking about it, and

make life around them more pleasant by their usual good temper, are

suspected of indifference."

"And in all this, what about you, Simone?"

"Me? I have a husband deep in government councils, haven't I? It is a

power in these days. People leave me alone."

"And Germaine?" asked Odette.

Simone appeared somewhat embarrassed. People hardly dared to talk of

Germaine Le Gault. Germaine Le Gault had lost her husband at about the

same time with Odette, and almost under the same circumstances. Like

Odette, Germaine adored her husband. Germaine had taken the loss even

more deeply to heart than Odette; her life had even been in danger.

Germaine, like Odette, still wore her deep widow's mourning. And

Germaine was now in love; in love beyond the possibility of concealment,

in love with a head physician in whose service she had worked. He was a

married man and a father.

"La Villaumer insists," said Simone, "that in her case it is simply a

lack of imagination, and that no one should blame her. He says, you

understand, that she is unable to bring before herself, as you do, for

example, a vision of her husband. If she had been capable of bearing

about with her a persistent picture of him, she would have been

faithful, if it were only to a picture; but she has no imagination; it

is necessary to her that her mind should rest upon an object. It is one

explanation--probably a paradox."

At that moment they heard in the neighboring apartment the playing of an

excellent pianist which had formerly lulled the reveries of Odette when

she was waiting for Jean. That neighboring apartment, into which the

Jacquelins had never set foot, was separated from theirs only by a thin

partition and a door. The music had often fretted Jean, but when Odette

was alone she had loved to hear it.

"Listen!" said Odette. "Oh, it is more than eighteen months since I have

heard music!"

"That is so," said Simone; "in Paris one finds a little of everything

that one used to love; it is that that hurts."

"What is she playing?" asked Simone after a moment.

It was a revery; two lovers who are seeking one another, groping in the

darkness of a garden on a lovely summer night; you hear their hesitating

footsteps, you suspect their vexed and feverish gestures, their eager

lips that call one another without imprudently pronouncing a name;

though their footsteps creak upon the gravel and a fountain drops its

slow pearls into the basin. Suddenly the music of a waltz attracts them

separately to the lighted house, and they exchange kisses on the steps

of the entrance, before being swallowed up in the intoxicating motion.

"Oh!" exclaimed Odette, thrilled, "do you remember, do you remember?"

"What?" asked Simone.

"Why, everything! Everything that happened _before_, before this end of

the world that never ends!"

Odette, overcome by the harmonious reminder of the waltz of a possible

festival, of the joy of living, of being pretty, young, beloved, could

only repeat:

"I haven't heard ... anything ... for more than eighteen months, Simone!

Do you remember that evening at Mme. Sormellier's, at Bellevue, where

both our husbands were so beautiful?"

"And we, too, Odette! We shall be old after the war. We shall have had

hardly five or six years of youth. I will confess to you that sometimes

I juggle with fate. I go to see Clotilde, who refuses to permit herself

to be touched by events. She says: 'I can do nothing about it; I am good

for nothing. Let the world let me alone as I let it alone! Till my last

hour I will stay with my flowers, my books, and my music.'"

"Ah! Clotilde, yes; do you know, I had forgotten her!"

"Everybody is forgetting her, and she forgets everybody. Her husband is

at Great Headquarters; he often comes. She is a privileged person, and

she says: 'Why should I not accept all the good that is offered me?'"

"Yes," said Odette, "it is tempting, but I could not do it.--No, I could

not.--See, I tried to shut myself up with my grief. Well, I could not.

It is too great--this universal sorrow--too absorbing. Listen!"

The pianist next door, still devoted to her Chopin, which she performed

in a remarkable manner, was beginning the First Nocturne, the one that

contains that phrase of lamentation, heartrending in its sober scheme

and its sustained phrasing, without outcry or burst of passion, leaving

the soul to the lasting sense of human woe.

"Oh, listen--listen!"

The pianist was accompanying herself with her grave, finely cadenced

voice, following without words the sinuous course of the thrice-repeated

utterance of sorrow. Odette began to sob; her nerves were unstrung by

the apparent return to things of former days, while yet acutely

conscious of the dreadful present.

"I must give up this apartment, after all," she said between her sobs.

"Yes, you will have to," replied Simone; "you would be overwhelmed with

your sense of loss."

"For that matter I must give up everything."

"Everything? What more, do tell me!"

"Myself! See, I cannot delude myself longer."

"My poor Odette! You are hardly four days out of your hospital, and you

go to pieces! We are only kept up by the presence of those who have

suffered a thousand times more than we. You can't imagine what it is for

me that my Pierrot has miraculously escaped death, with his body half

destroyed. It is he who saves me from unhappiness. Those who have looked

death in the face and yet have returned to life find it beautiful,

whatever it is, and their wonder at it spreads to all around them."

"Yes, yes. I have felt that. If I had my poor Jean, even all broken to

pieces, I should think only of the joy of having him safe. But I have

him no longer, and the past draws me, at times, as if some one much

stronger than I were taking me by the arms and drawing me backward with

irresistible power. Do you remember Isadora dancing among her children

and throwing flowers in one of the motives of the ballet of "Armida"?

And that great fool Antoine Laloire behind us, crying: 'When one has

seen that one may well say, "Thank you," to God and close one's eyes

forever!' He had no idea how well he was speaking. They say he had a

splendid death."

"Yes. All our admiration must from this time forward be given to the

beauty of our warriors. Harmonious forms, enchantment--we are done with

them all, my poor child, done with them!"

"Done with them! So they say. So I thought, too, when I saw those men

coming in by the hundreds, reduced to a mass of bleeding pulp; I still

think so when I think of the long line of devastation which is spreading

over Europe, of all those human beings who are every day dying around

their torpedoed vessels; but think! The moment the art of our former

days is able to realize itself anywhere, beyond a partition, it rises

upon us like the sun that has been two days hidden. It will rise again,

Simone! If only a few individuals are left who can hear a note, a

shepherd will be found to invent the flute once again, by bringing reeds

together."

"You say that because the art of which you are speaking only increases

your sadness. You are cultivating your sadness, and loving it still. If

you were less melancholy, like me, you would consent to accept the new

life just as it offers itself; but you will always see it irremediably

disfigured, poisoned by an overwhelming horror. Life from henceforth is

a Lady Macbeth with red and horrific hands, marking with a bloody spot

everything that it touches. What fine art could flourish except by means

of men not yet born, men who will not come into the world until after

this horror is no longer spoken about?"

"Remember what those poor friends of ours used to say when they talked

so well in our gatherings of former days: the flowers that bloom on

graves are as fresh and the harvests that grow on battlefields are more

abundant than those on fields that have never known crime and death;

they are innocent, divinely innocent of all the past. The souls of

artists are like flowers; and they purify the imaginations that have

been soiled."

"And the conclusion is that you and I both, my dear, have after all a

good share of optimism, otherwise called a reserve strength upon which

we can draw for a certain time. Let us hope it may be for a long time.

And we find the same thing under the distress of nearly all men. Ah, how

strong life is!"

XI

Odette began a round of visits.

For the most part they were visits of condolence. She went first to Mme.

de Blauve, who had lately lost her young son, that charming boy of

seventeen whom Odette had seen for a second in the Avenue d'Iena flying

to the recruiting-office, to take the place of his father, who had been

killed in the second month of the war. Mme. de Blauve had come back from

Rheims, where at that time she had been a nurse, under unceasing

bombardments; she had returned to her daughters, who were now growing

up. Odette found the family no more crushed or morose than at the first

time. The father, Commandant de Blauve, adored by all, was dead; the

elder son, in his nineteenth year, was dead.

"Happily," said Mme. de Blauve, "I have one left."

"How old is he?" asked Odette anxiously.

"He is about to enlist," said Mme. de Blauve simply. "Through him, I

hope that our name will be represented to the end."

Every one knew that this last son was her Benjamin, petted more than all

her other children. Her present anxiety was for her daughters; she would

fain have married them at once.

"Marry them!" cried Odette; "but to whom, at such a time as this?"

"To good young soldiers, that they may soon have children."

Not the slightest emotion, though the family was truly affectionate; one

single idea--to come to the defense of the country, by whatever means.

Odette could not but admire, though at the same time she trembled.

"How far advanced is your mourning?" asked Mme. de Blauve almost

severely.

"What?" asked Odette.

"I mean, how long is it since you lost you dear husband?"

"Just eighteen months," replied Odette.

"You are young," said Mme. de Blauve; "my child, you still have duties

to perform."

"But," said Odette, bewildered, "I am doing what I can."

"We will speak again of it in a few months," said Mme. de Blauve. "I

shall not lose sight of you. I count you among the _good_ ones."

She dwelt upon the word "good" as she bade Odette good-by.

Odette did not in the least grasp Mme. de Blauve's meaning. Did she find

her "good" because she had for a long time been conscientiously doing a

nurse's duties, and did she think of sending her to some difficult post,

requiring courage and constancy? She was cheerfully ready for anything.

Only one thing troubled her; it was that the memory of Jean seemed to be

relegated to so distant a past, seemed to hold so small a place in the

thoughts of the people whom she was about to see, she being still in

deep mourning, and having been away only seventeen months, to mourn for

Jean.

Why did Odette go directly from the Avenue d'Iena to see Clotilde? Not

in the least by reason of the love of contrast, or the need for it, but

because she was passing the Place of the United States, which attracted

her with its trees adorned with their young leafage.

She found Clotilde as she had always found her, extended upon an ancient

couch, amid twenty cushions, a dozen books and magazines, in an elegant

room, with a bunch of carnations flaunting their glory, and hyacinths in

pots surrounding the young woman with a fragrant suggestion of spring.

"Ah!" exclaimed Odette as she entered, without quite perceiving the

significance of her exclamation.

Clotilde, perfumed and her tall figure clothed in a Babani robe, kissed

her joyfully.

"You haven't fallen off much, Odette. Tell me, are these your cheeks? No

more rouge than in the old days? Oh, how often I think of your loss, my

dear!"

She was the first person, except La Villaumer, who had spoken to her of

her loss. Then there was still some one who remembered what had been her

happiness, her extraordinary happiness.

"I haven't written to you, Odette, because I was too lazy, and because I

need to imagine the face of the person to whom I write. So far away,

under your nurse's cap, I couldn't tell--you are pretty; I love you

always. Oh, how sorry I am for you!"

Odette, surprised, embarrassed, still under the influence of the life

she had been leading, spoke as every one did:

"There are so many of us who deserve to be pitied."

"No, Odette, no; I am not saying that. No doubt there are many widows

and many young women whose husbands or lovers are maimed, disfigured,

ruined. But there are not many who, before all that, have truly enjoyed

life and love. You have known love. You have had a few years that are

worth being regretted."

Tears rose to Odette's eyes. They were tears that gave no pain, which

rather comforted her. It seemed that she had long been waiting to shed

such tears. She had so constantly heard conventional words, forced

expressions, the result of a strained situation which there was surely

no reason to criticise; but, except from her wounded soldiers, she had

not before heard words simply human.

Clotilde was not afraid to talk persistently of Jean, not because she

felt that at bottom she was giving pleasure to her friend, but because

her thoughts naturally turned to attractive things, and she loved to

remember that charming couple of perfect lovers that Jean and Odette had

been. Never having checked her instinct, it now told her that Odette, in

spite of her tears, enjoyed the revival of these memories. It was not

Jean the soldier, Jean the hero, whose praises Clotilde sang. Odette had

heard so many praises of heroes! She had handled so many with her own

hands! There had never been but one Jean. He was Jean, just Jean, a

fine, good, and handsome fellow who had nothing military, nothing

surprising about him, except just that he was beloved. Who had dared to

talk to her of that Jean since the war? No one. Clotilde was doing it in

the unconsciousness of a woman who was still what she had been _before_.

And Odette had felt some apprehension about seeing Clotilde again, just

because she had feared that Clotilde had really not changed enough!

The interview was soothing, even delightful to her. Clotilde seemed

almost to have forgotten the war--a little more and she would have made

her forget it. She talked of the books that she was reading; books

written earlier than the present time; she talked, too, laughingly of

her clothes, on the pretext of the diminished resources of the family;

she spoke of certain middle-aged and even old men, saying that they had

not been appreciated in the days when there had been plenty of young

fellows. She offered her friend a cigarette; she smoked, and the two

women looked at each other through curls of long, light clouds, as if in

a dream.

Odette went out somewhat amazed at the incredible ivory tower which

Clotilde had succeeded in building around her youth, her beauty, and her

selfishness.

"Is Clotilde selfish?" she asked herself, as she turned from the Square

of the United States. "And yet how she asked about my Jean! Clotilde is

like every one else; she is interested in just one thing, has a passion

for it. She has kept as by a miracle the one thing that she had before

the war, and that is love. Everything that represents love captivates

her; one feels that she gives herself up to it. The others yield to a

different passion which, by the conditions of our time, takes on a more

sympathetic form. Mme. de Blauve with sacred fury throws all her family

into the jaws of Moloch; Mme. de Calouas, in Surville, has a passion

only for the wounded, exclusively for wounded soldiers; I have seen her

utterly insensible to an accident to a civilian; most of those women in

the hospital had a passion for their duties there, thought themselves

degraded when they had not the number of beds that satisfied their

pride, lamented as if for a public misfortune when, by chance, fewer

wounded soldiers came. There are even people whose passion it is to have

no passions--and they are the most to be dreaded. Why should Clotilde

deprive herself of her bouquet of carnations, her pot of hyacinths, her

perfumed cigarettes, while they serve to create around her the illusion

by which she lives, and of which, when the occasion comes, she gives her

weary friends the benefit for a whole hour? Yet, could I do like her?

No; decidedly not. Did not I, then, love love as she does? I do not

know, I loved Jean. Then I am less simple than she; everything affects

me. And everything is shaken. I am not flattering myself when I

recognize that I am alive to more than one thing. I wanted to be wholly

devoted to one--to my sorrow. I believe that I am alive only to my

grief, and yet sometimes I think that in this I am mistaken."

That day she felt an overwhelming lassitude. Clotilde had lapped her in

"soft odors." As she was asking herself how she could finish the day she

bethought her that she had been told that Mme. Leconque was another

Clotilde, that is to say, a fairy capable of drawing one out of the war

mood, though she belonged to a social set that was just now holding it

as a great honor to give to it unstintingly both life and fortune.

"I must not fail of seeing her," said Odette to herself, "and just now I

prefer another Clotilde to a second Mme. de Blauve, who makes me

shudder." She took a taxi to the end of the Avenue du Bois.

Mme. Leconque was at home and alone. Muffled up in an ermine coverlet,

in a room brightened by a wood-fire large enough to warm an

assembly-room in the city hall, and surrounded by objects of art,

ancient trinkets, Watteaux, Fragonards, she lay on a couch near a

majestic bed, high and royal, covered with Venetian point, determinedly

knitting, amid yawns, little stockings of coarse wool, for refugee

children.

"You, at least, have had enough of this butchery," she said.

Odette, under her mourning-veil, admitted that for her part she found no

pleasure in it.

"I should be glad to know," went on Mme. Leconque, "what sort of a life

they are giving us."

Odette looked around at the great wood-fire, the walls of the room, a

perfect museum, and at the silky fleece that enwrapped the form of the

dissatisfied woman.

"They have just telephoned me," Mme. Leconque went on, "that we have

evacuated Malancourt. Just look at my stockings, if you call them

stockings! I admit that I never paid seventy-five francs a pair for

mine--I always sent to London for them and got them at thirty-five

francs. And to-day I am wearing stockings at 3 francs 95!"

"Why do you?" asked Odette.

"You would despise me if I paid more for them, in these days. You are in

mourning, my poor dear; you don't think about these matters. Do you know

where we are all getting our clothes? In the Rue d'Alesia, my child, in

a store where they sell ribbons on the main floor for eight sous a

metre, and up-stairs you find models of all the great Paris dressmakers

at a third of the regular price. You might go there out of curiosity;

I'll take you, if you like. You will find ten autos at the door, lined

up before the tin-shop, the general shops, the house-painters, and the

wine-shops. And where do you think we try on? Anywhere, no matter where.

On the staircase, in the corridors, in the shop itself, three women

together, not to speak of the old husbands and the men on leave, in a

little parlor decorated with two opposite mirrors! Absolute promiscuity,

a mob that reminds you of the old Neuilly fair; broken windows, no heat,

and drafts of air that pierce through the lungs! My dear, I bought a

charmeuse gown there for one hundred and seventy-five francs that would

have cost seven hundred and fifty at Lanvin's! The Duchess of

Chateauruque goes there; the wife of the ambassador from X. goes, too.

Can you imagine such a thing? Oh! we run against picturesque things

during this war! Do you believe that life can go on this way?"

"I don't think so, indeed," said Odette.

"I see that you aren't pitying us. Well, for my part I tell you that I

have had enough of this war, and that I despise it! Do you understand? I

despise it. Ugh! ugh! and ugh!"

Odette returned home along the darkening streets, thinking of Mme. de

Blauve, the terrible. She felt much indulgence for Mme. de Blauve, the

terrible.

XII

Odette had bought a newspaper. During the night the Germans had made a

series of massed attacks, debouching upon Malancourt from three

directions at once. Our troops had evacuated the devastated village

"while keeping its outlets."

Once again she tried to take refuge in her memories of love. But this

evening the portraits of Jean that she saw around her did not speak to

her of love. She felt that Jean, if he were there, would not talk of

love that evening, but would turn away like an overwrought man to whom

the beloved one insists upon saying: "Kiss me!" She could distinctly see

the gesture which, however, she had seldom known. She could almost hear

Jean saying: "My little love, I am anxious.... It is not that I lack

confidence, but they are advancing step by step; it is disquieting,

disquieting. You will think me cruel, but I should be glad to go back

there. I would rather be there, do you see?" If he had been with her on

permission he would have gone back! What torture! And she said to

herself: "If he had not been killed the second month he would have been

killed since then: twenty months without respite under the shells!"

Days passed; the German attack upon Verdun wrought upon the great public

of France a great silence. No noise, not an exclamation, no excesses in

Paris; an imposing calm; a quiet crowd upon the boulevards, perfect

order even on Sunday; almost gayety around the men who were home on

leave who went about surrounded by young women in short skirts, Anamite

caps or toques borrowed from the Palais, painfully walking on

extravagantly high heels! Between four o'clock and seven every one was

reading the newspaper. They were sold all through the city, not with

loud shouts as if all Europe had been put to fire and sword, as when

celebrated trials were going on; now that Europe actually was put to

fire and sword, with less uproar than after the Auteuil races. In almost

every heart the sublimity of the French struggle, the universal respect

which it evoked throughout the world, overcame apprehension, stifled the

sense of uncounted losses, and dominated that crater on the banks of the

Meuse, in eruption over an extent of thirty-five kilometres, its lava

overwhelming a whole countryside.

Odette was invited to dine with officers who had returned from that

hell, who were going back to it; and these men talked futilities like

every one else: partly from kindliness, partly for their own pleasure,

or in courteous resumption of the decorum of former days. Between two

witticisms they would relate an episode such as no story of the age of

fable could offer. Many of them were men who two years before had danced

the tango, whom strait-laced old twaddlers had in those days held up to

opprobrium. Thus Odette met again a young fellow of twenty-four, a

captain, an officer of the Legion of Honor, lacking several fingers,

wounded in the leg and the breast. He had the same simplicity, the same

childlike grace, as in the old time at the Casino in Surville, and yet

he had taken part in actions infinitely more grand than those of the

Homeric heroes or of the wars of Cæsar or Alexander.

He kissed a lady's hand, and that same evening went back to the jaws of

the volcano. And that same week the word came that after having been

three times buried alive in the undermined earth, his young body had

been blown to atoms on Hill 304.

XIII

The next morning, her friend La Villaumer having come to see her, she

introduced a subject which had been tormenting her.

"The individuality of the soldier is not obliterated," said La

Villaumer. "Either he expects to come through safe, believing himself to

be a privileged person among the unlucky, or else he says to himself, 'I

shall die, but it will be for something worth while,' and that even

exalts his individuality. When that disappears or becomes attenuated it

is by excess of suffering, of hoping against hope for the end of all

that he is enduring--mud, cold, the incessant wooing of death, and ills

without number, have annihilated in him all power of thought and

feeling. And still it would be speaking too strongly to say that he goes

deliberately to meet death. Never has any living being failed to pay to

death the honor of a particular deference."

"Do you think," asked Odette, "that one's individuality can be suddenly

lost, or is it not rather unconsciously modified from day to day? You

see, in the latter case no one can tell how far the metamorphosis may

go! I see many people who have changed in the last eighteen months, and

who seem not to be aware of it. I feel very clearly that I myself am

different. I find only one part of myself unchanged; the part which

binds me to the memory of my poor husband; nothing there is modified

even in the very slightest degree--nothing; when I have leisure to think

intently of him, I become again precisely the woman I used to be."

"Yes, but with grief in addition."

"That is true."

"It is that which modifies us. It broadens us when it finds a heart in

us, and for that matter it exists only so far as it finds a heart. It

holds within itself many possibilities. Your grief began with embracing

your personal calamity; that alone; and it still hugs it to itself, that

is most natural; but it has unconsciously taken a further step,

embracing the sorrows of others, a change which you never looked for.

And that is making of you another person."

"Will every one like me find themselves a tone above or below what they

used to be--as if the whole keyboard had been transposed?"

"I do not think so," said La Villaumer. "Nature changes little. Only

sensitive souls are modified, and they are rare. It is they who at last,

at the long last, act upon and change those around them. Characters

change little, never fear! Yet this war will have been so intense that

those at least who have had a part in it will retain something of it,

like a strong leaven which will cause new things to germinate. We must

expect new things; but we must not look to see the human race thrown off

its centre. Historians, sociologists will have their work to do, while

philosophers, moralists, the general run of writers may go on as they

have done. The word 'democracy,' for instance, will cover much

paper----"

"Do you believe in such a thing, yourself?"

"I believe in the word as I believe in all words. It is a mistake to

disdain the old-fashioned verbalism--rhetoric, eloquence. The majority

of words are hollow--yes, but they are hollow like bells whose

sonorousness may by itself shake the whole world. Those who use words

are inspired by various things, and generally by sentiments that they

cannot acknowledge; yet the word touches the finest chords in the soul

of men whom one wants to win over. 'Democracy' has a tone----"

"Which will work good?--or evil?"

"Alas! The popular instinct and an inevitable necessity urge men, in

spite of words, to enslave themselves, and they will of their own accord

submit to the tyranny of new leaders, new groups representing interests

of which the crowd will know nothing. Almost all my pessimism is founded

on the irresistible character of this law. Men must be commanded, and no

one can be sure that those who command will not abuse their authority or

the confidence which is freely granted to them. However, the official

programme of democracy will be to devote all its effort to the

well-being of poor humans who have not an average of fifty years to live

in this world, who no longer believe in another world, and who in truth

have some legitimate aspirations to live their few years for their own

benefit, and with as little pain as possible."

"Poor men!"

"Yes, 'poor men!' That expresses the immense pity that will well up in

every breast, throughout the entire universe. Fate will have demanded

much of the human race. No doubt man has suffered through all time; but

in a manner so prolonged and so scientifically cruel--no! At all events,

never have men suffered in such great numbers; never have they been so

acutely conscious of their sufferings. And then, in former times men who

suffered had not been learnedly informed that the world had come to the

end of suffering. Those who are suffering now believed themselves to

have reached the highest point of a period of progress in every

direction. Never had man more firmly believed himself to be on the

border of the Promised Land, than at the very moment when he stumbled

into the infernal pit! What an aggravation of torment! Men may have been

sacrificed for far-off ends which too often have not been attained; they

may have been obliged, merely for their own preservation as living

beings, to obliterate their own intelligence, and to become through long

years--they themselves have said it--a sort of brute. Those who will

survive will not ask the meaning of subtleties, or will not be in a

condition to understand them. They will have only one thought: 'And now,

what of me, me, me?'"

"A revival of individuality, then?"

"Yes, but of a fierce individuality, in which all that has for so long a

time been stifled within them will urge them on to mistaken acts; or

else of an exhausted individuality which will be the prey of exploiters

never known before."

"Then you do not believe in a general betterment after this upheaval?"

"I only believe in more or less prolonged periods during which faith in

betterment is possible."

"But, after all, man has goodness within him! He carries an ideal in his

breast!"

"That is to say that he carries within himself--nowhere but in

himself--that small portion of happiness which he may ever hope to

attain. In fact, I hold him to be truly happy only as he exercises

goodness, or as he aspires to what he deems the best. Man, the child,

the savage, very clearly recognizes justice, much less clearly the

beautiful; but the idea of the beautiful, however imperfect it may be in

him, moves and may make him better. If he permits himself to slide down

those inclines which deviate from these ideas, he may experience a dizzy

joy of a bad kind. He may work himself up to enjoy strange pleasures,

but seldom without at the same time perceiving that he is duping

himself, and that pure and deep joy is not in these things. Yes, it is

in himself that man finds his sole source of felicity, as the glowworm

his light. It may be that justice is entirely inapplicable and the

beautiful wholly conventional, but what we may be sure of is that the

inclination toward the just and the beautiful is most fruitful in happy

results, though they will perhaps never find absolute realization."

"That is all very well; but in fact you believe neither in beauty nor in

justice!"

"I believe in the passionate endeavor of man toward beauty and justice."

"Which he will never attain?"

La Villaumer suddenly changed his tone, and gazing smilingly upon the

young woman said:

"That would be paradise, my dear friend; be reasonable!"

XIV

It was the last hour of an April afternoon; budding foliage on the

trees, the Arc de Triomphe, upon which every saunterer who looks to-day,

looks with the vision of the triumphal procession to come, and the

Champs-Elysées, unequalled promenade, which Odette and La Villaumer had

so often seen crowded and joyful, in the days when the world was happy.

"Do you remember? Oh, you were a little girl, loving to hang around

Guignol and trail after the goat-carts. But I was then no longer very

young. Do you remember the time when there were no automobiles, and when

the victorias used to go slowly down the street bearing beautifully

dressed women whom one had time to admire, to criticise, to recognize,

and salute? The auto is perfect, but the best it can do is to rush from

one place to another, and that has by no means the interest of the daily

procession, when it seemed that every one still had time to live. Excuse

my capricious imagination, but it seems to me that these machines were

made just to bring us with all the more haste to the frightful time in

which we are living. I dare say this to you because I know that you are

not going to remind me that autos are rendering admirable service to the

war, especially at this very time. You think, like me, that they also

render service to our enemies, and that all these rapid means of

reaching the battlefield coincide with a war without a conceivable end.

In a general way, scientific inventions--don't confuse them with the

sciences, which merit all veneration--conspire to give to this war a

character of atrocity to which no armed conflict has ever attained, and

I wish that it could be proved to me that they alleviate it in equal

proportion. Think only of the horror which this 'progress' in the art of

extermination inspires. How many brains are unable to resist it?

Civilians are dying every day, and the best of them, who go to pieces

merely from imagining the war. We see them fall like the hollow bark

which still seems to support a tree. You yourself did not know in your

childhood the amazement that Jules Verne's 'Nautilus' caused. But you

witnessed the crazy conduct of your contemporaries the first time they

saw an airship sailing about in the air. It was pretty, to be sure, and

the audacity of the early pilots roused us all to enthusiasm. Recall to

mind the saying that was current on the greensward at Deauville when

twelve airplanes arrived from Havre, three hundred metres above the

earth, all rosy in the sunset rays. 'The flying Peace,' some one said.

I shrugged my shoulders sorrowfully, because I know that in the face of

an astounding invention one must always think of the homicidal use to

which man may put it. Man has once again stolen the fire of heaven; a

new Zeus will punish him for it. Humanity will blindly and with ecstasy

invent the instrument of its own destruction. By means of an admirable

scientific instrument it will commit wholesale suicide with a beatific

smile. Man has already abdicated in favor of a machine. The war that is

being waged is a war no longer of men but of material. Man is belittled;

the machine surpasses him! A rudimentary intelligence suffices to set

the true force in motion. We are still believers in the ancient saying

that the true force is manly virtue, the fine, old-fashioned bravery. We

have belittled the only thing in the world which might be wholly

great--man. Do we profess to worship that bravery of man which all the

past has justified? Why, by the scientific character of war it has

become--one dares permit himself the blasphemy--almost a sign of

inferiority. We reckon upon the mystical value of our bravery, and we

send our men by the thousands against an army of tools! By virtue of our

century-old prejudices we honor only the man who exposes himself,

sacrifices himself, furnishes, however uselessly, his proofs of courage,

when the glory of our arms will belong to him who shall most securely

have sheltered his divisions behind gigantic steam-hammers! The applied

sciences have caused a moral revolution. By riveting man, who is before

all else a soul, to material elements, they have destroyed whatever

might be justifiable in the great contests of humanity. A paltry little

engineer behind his disguised heavy cannon, or with his mitrailleuse

under thirty metres of cement, counts for more than our superb heroes

with their courage, their loyalty, and their white gloves. Man, chained

like a galley-slave to a machine, to a chemical substance, is forced to

unlearn what it is to be a man. He appears very intelligent when he is

equipped with algebra and terminology; yes, we must grant to matter all

that it can give, but pause a little: have you not an impression that

something superior is lacking in so abnormal a compound? They have

domesticated the forces of nature; they believe themselves Titans; and

there they stand glowering at one another like beasts; they cannot

distinguish themselves from these material fabrics that surprise and

overwhelm them. They call themselves masters of matter, and matter is

all the time jeering at them. Engineering genius is probably not the

result of a knowledge of matter, but of a knowledge of man."

XV

At that period people were still dulling their senses with words and

stupefying their minds with discussions, if so they might divert them

from that one place which for the time being was as the pivot of the

world, upon which they had for six months felt that all depended, as two

years before all had for ten days depended upon the battle of the Marne.

La Villaumer went to his club; his lip curled with an almost wicked

smile at the thought of the ridiculously false news which that evening,

as every other, he was about to hear. Then he reflected that the

charming Odette, whom he had just quitted was very young, and asked

himself whom she might marry.

Odette, still carried away with the life at Surville, sick at heart with

those friends of hers who were doing nothing but dying of _ennui_ and so

demoralizing those around them, found comfort in frequenting such hives

of activity as the Franco-Belgian headquarters and its numerous annexes,

all congregated in the same building on the Champs-Elysées, where it

seemed that all the misery of the world was perpetually going up and

down its staircases, without respite and without end. She would go there

as if in answer to a summons. So many, so many unfortunates who had lost

their dearest possessions, their house, their village church! Meeting

them on the muddy steps, she seemed to see, reflected in their startled

eyes, a bit of countryside, a poplar-bordered road, a bit of garden, a

hillside, fields of beets or of wheat. She had travelled, she knew all

those sights which are the natural companions of the life of men. The

odor of the hamlets came back to her, the warm breath of stables, the

noisome scent of stagnant pools, the sharp smell of the tanneries in the

north, the balsamic fragrance of cedar smoke from the bakeries, the

appetizing aroma of warm bread, so little known in Paris. Then she would

picture to herself the bewilderment of all these folk who had found

refuge in a great, strange city to which they were not born, of these

families who would never, never again see anything but the ruins of

their villages, their countryside made unrecognizable by the absence of

every elm, every bit of woods! She could have embraced them as they

passed her; she longed to give them everything she possessed, things

which, alas! could not replace what they had lost!

She thought to herself: "What have they done? Of what are these people

guilty? Why are these men tortured? Why were they captured and their

poor homes and little fields destroyed, and the sons of their blood, who

alone gave a moral meaning to their lives? Why were not these people

masters of themselves? Why were they the prey of bandits who consider

even their own people as puppets, created to serve their vainglory as

soldiers, and who care less for the existence of thousands of living

creatures than a child for his tin soldiers?" Her heart throbbed, her

soul revolted. She reached the top of the stairs.

To this building she had come without invitation to see an American

woman who was freely and calmly consecrating her fortune, her

intelligence, and her time to the unfortunates of the war. She came to

ask if there was not something that she could do. The American woman

looked at her with a smile.

"You have something better to do for your country."

"What?" asked Odette.

"Oh, we will speak of that later."

This answer had already been made to her. It had been said to her even

at Surville, in the hospital, and with a mysterious air.

She was disturbed by it, and spoke of it, on a venture, to Simone de

Prans, whom she saw that evening.

Simone and her husband both smiled as the American lady had done.

"What do you all mean?"

"Don't be disturbed," said Pierre de Prans seriously; "take care of

yourself. A woman like you has services to give."

"Well, I must do something," said Odette, trembling under her veil, "and

as it is, I am doing absolutely nothing with my ten fingers!"

XVI

"Whenever the cloud of anguish rises even a little from the sky of

Paris," said La Villaumer, "this city, so marvellously alive, clasps to

itself life, of whatever kind, with a simple, natural impulse, without

immoderation, but with a secret smile, always ready. Yet this power of

life, on the whole so beautiful, has something that brings a frown to

the brow of the onlooker; for it has within it insensibility and

forgetfulness.

"How disconcerting it is to see this new, mutilated humanity, pass in

the streets almost without attracting attention. Young men in uniform,

or returned to civil life minus a leg, on crutches, with an artificial

limb, leaning on a cane like an old man, with an empty coat sleeve, an

eye gone, nothing left of the nose but two breathing-holes, the jaw

moulded over like a lump of potter's clay--or led along, sightless! They

hardly arouse compassion, seldom even curiosity. There are so many of

them! You can see the like in any place. War crosses, military medals,

the Legion of Honor on the breast of a mere youth, which at one time

would have attracted admiring glances and brought tears to women's eyes,

are now hardly noticed. There are so many who have received or have

deserved them! Most of those who possess them now wear only the ribbon

on their jackets like civilians. The long duration and the barbarism of

the war have spoiled everything. Men whose exploits cast into the shade

the most famous examples of history with which the memory of school

children is crammed, refuse to be called heroes. Heroes! There are so

many of them! It was not to distinguish themselves, nor to cover their

families with honor, nor even to set a noble example, that so many men

have wrought prodigies; they did them modestly, because they had to be

done in order to put an end to an abomination. With many the idea even

of the country is attenuated in favor of something which makes much less

appeal to the heart, the motive of which is only the cold persuasion

that militarism must be destroyed; one must fight for very hatred of

fighting. And here is something new, this vast uprising for war is

producing no enthusiasm for war; it is animated only by hatred of war.

All these brave men, riddled like sieves, rescued from an ordeal without

precedent, are cherishing no ambition to march in a procession of

victors, under waving flags, amid the acclamations of women, children,

and old men; they had the rudimentary purpose of the peasant who

struggles with a mad dog, and who having downed him digs a hole, buries

the carrion, washes his hands at the pump, and goes in to dinner.

"Germany has robbed man of his divine childhood. In less than two years

all these men have grown old; that charming faculty of innocent

enthusiasm which had often deceived him, but which had given him joys

never to be replaced, has been withered. The most deplorable ruins which

the monster has spread abroad over our land are perhaps not so much the

splendid monuments of Belgium and France, as the youth of humanity, that

had seemed eternal, that was bearing it on to a great outburst of a

common hope--faith in Fraternity, faith in Liberty, faith in Justice,

potent religion of Progress. Cold reason, like the German gas, has

poisoned all this fresh and ebullient vigor. The whole world has become

allied, only to strangle a jackal. No man who has come back from the too

severe ordeal will ever again feel the desire to enjoy the days that yet

remain to him. Scepticism, which used to seem only a way of looking at

things, cherished by very distinguished gentlemen, has now taken

possession of the mass. But it has become commonplace, and so has ceased

all relations with its brother, dilettantism. You will see what sort of

thing realistic scepticism will become."

"People will always dream," said Odette.

XVII

Odette returned to Surville in the beginning of August. It was a time of

great heat. The second anniversary of mobilization had been observed.

War had become an accepted condition. Many already found it difficult to

remember a state of peace. At the hospital there were even discussions

as to how things had been there before the war. There were those who,

though they had then been living in Surville, could not recall them to

mind. "You remember the inaugural address of the head doctor, the 16th

of August, before the first train of wounded came?" Some of the women

insisted that he had given an antimilitarist lecture; others that he had

spoken only against alcohol; others that he had given an eloquently

patriotic address; some said that it was not he who had spoken, but the

surgeon, a very handsome man; and still others that the address was

given on another date. One lady could only remember the first time she

had posed to the photographer in white blouse and cap. The first arrival

of wounded, who had come from Charleroi on August 25, were confused with

those who had come in September. Two years! What a long time when one

has seen only wretchedness upon wretchedness! Nothing pleasant for

twenty-four months! The communiqué of the battle of the Marne? Yes,

that counted for something; but at the time no one understood its full

importance; there had been no public rejoicing. Our later long and

magnificent victories that merely held back the enemy presented to the

mind nothing like what is generally thought of as military success; it

was only after a while that their importance was recognized, when new

misfortunes had touched us elsewhere. Two years of dull, black

weariness, of constant apprehension, of bereavement upon bereavement.

This year a good many foreigners had invaded the beach. The

tennis-courts were occupied by young men from beyond the sea, bringing

up the memory of former days; the crowd was enlivened by a profusion of

multicolored Japanese lanterns; the sea dashed against the glossy flesh

of women who seemed as natural as Aphrodite; automobiles were almost as

much in the way as in happier days; and between the rows of tents among

the manifold tints of colored stuffs, beside the waves where so many

beautiful limbs were disporting themselves, was a race of beings that

might have been deemed peculiar, coming, going, or remaining motionless;

they were the men who had escaped from the fire. They wore nondescript

garments, they lacked one limb or even two, they hobbled, their armpits

strained by crutches, or lay at length on the warm sand, smoking, timid

of appearance, exchanging remarks hardly comprehensible, keeping silent,

too, thinking--of what?

This last spectacle alone seemed in Odette's eyes to merit

consideration. She had lived the greater part of the time among the

wounded, she had also lived in Paris with the social world. "All is

over," she would say to herself; "nothing will heal all this; it is mere

mummery to ape the life of other days; all that is blotted out; La

Villaumer was right when he said: 'Men have suffered too much.'"

It was in this very place--there, opposite, at the hotel--that she had

become acquainted with Jean. They were pleased with one another at the

first glance, carried out of themselves, even. She remembered how mad

with love she had been in those garden walks, between those

tennis-screens, on that beach, and along that terrace which now she was

treading overwhelmed with despair, a despair that she could not name,

greater than herself, greater than the broad horizon of the sea, greater

than all things.

She had forgotten nothing. She recalled all the preludes of marriage,

then those first vacations, their dual solitude in the midst of the

throng; kisses exchanged on these dunes, along these roadsides, in some

charming farm orchard, or on certain evenings before the fairylike

spectacle of the phosphorescent sea; she remembered that room in the

Hôtel de Normandie where he had left her a few days before the 2d of

August! And she recalled to mind the beautiful sky of that day, and the

tocsin pealing from all the church-towers of the countryside, and the

rolling of the drum, and the young men raising their hats. How many of

them were alive to-day?

XVIII

She had hardly finished luncheon when she heard the jingling of the

little bell at the wooden gate of her garden. Mme. de Calouas came in.

Mme. de Calouas found Odette surrounded by photographs of Jean. They

were on the walls, the chimneypiece, the tables, the desk, the piano.

Odette had taken the opportunity of her journey to carry to the

photographer every film that she possessed; she had had them enlarged,

and she was surrounded by Jean as if Jean had become a whole people; she

saw him in every room of her cottage and in all places; she felt

somewhat tranquil only when she could see him. If she seldom or never

spoke of him elsewhere, as soon as she returned home she belonged only

to him. She talked to him, consulted him, and heard the replies which,

in accordance with his character, he would have made her to-day, if he

had lived, if he had known what was taking place.

Mme. de Calouas looked about her at all these likenesses.

Mme. de Calouas was not among the number of hospital nurses who had been

rewarded by the epidemic medal, although she had not absented herself

for forty-eight hours since the outbreak of the war, and though her

position in the hospital was a most important one; but neglect of this

sort was either indifferent to her or it flattered her pride. She

belonged to a family of which every member professed absolute

indifference to rewards, especially to any that might come from the

public powers, and this although it was the tradition of the family to

addict themselves constantly to the highest duties. The magistrates

among them had retired some thirty-five years previously; the officers

remained fixed in the rank of captain. In the Morbihan the expression

"the Captains de Calouas" had become a common locution. At the outbreak

of the war "the Captains de Calouas" had shown themselves to be men of

the old-fashioned kind who considered that the finest part one can play

in the face of the enemy is to be killed by him. Their unanimous and

hardy bravery had, indeed, crowned nearly every one of them with the

halo of sacrifice. Those with whom death would have absolutely nothing

to do had this time risen in rank, and had received the cross after a

succession of actions and for exceptional valor even amidst so many

astonishing deeds. Of seven of them, only one was left, recently named

lieutenant-colonel, with an artificial arm and a damaged lung.

Mme. de Calouas excused herself for coming so early, but said that she

had felt an irresistible desire to talk freely with a friend in whom she

had discerned "a choice soul."

"In the sort of convent in which we lived so long side by side," she

said, "I consider myself somewhat as a mother to you, if you will permit

me to say so, seeing that I had the responsibility of opening its door

to you. Will you let me talk to you as a mother?"

"I have great need of it," said Odette;

"I have no mother, and I am a widow----"

She pointed around to the photographs of the dead. It was as if she were

in a cemetery, herself living in one of its vaults. Her eyes filled with

sudden tears.

"I love him as on the day he died; as on that other day, that dreadful

day when he left me--I cannot cry all this upon the housetops. You,

madame, have suffered like me, more even than me, the pain of this

horrible war; we can no longer speak of our dead! We have no right to

show our grief! There are too many griefs, too many dead. I have never

been able to talk about him; I have found only one person who would

consent to recall him with kindliness, and she is a Parisian, a

self-centred woman who has managed not to permit herself to be touched

by the war, a young woman, like me, but already a woman of former days.

Who is there, henceforth, who can dwell on her personal sorrow?"

"It remains to be seen, my poor dear," said Mme. de Calouas, "whether

what you say is an evil. I mean an evil for the time in which we live,

during this war which has no end, and during the many years after this

war; in a word, during all our lives--even yours. You know, my child,

that I am a woman bound to all the old customs. In our family widowhood

is a serious thing, and usually a thing for life. But this war has

modified even our most firmly established customs. Great necessities,

painful new duties, lie before us. We have been obliged to put down,

with a strong hand, many of our feelings; we are bound to subordinate

our personality and its most sacred traditions to the common weal. To

mourn a beloved husband--what is more touching and more worthy in a

young woman? But, my little friend, let me confide to you a cruel truth,

of which you are already beginning to be aware. You were just saying to

me that we can no longer talk about our dead husbands, however

gloriously they may have been killed; it is equally the case of both of

us. Well, forgive me for what I am going to say--it is one of the most

cruel features of this time that has no name--to mourn our husbands is a

sort of self-indulgence, it is a personal civility, it is almost a

delight! I shall startle you, but I must say it to you, I who am twenty

years older than you, because I recognize in you a noble heart,

broadened rather than belittled by this storm. My poor child, you have

no right to remain surrounded by these likenesses of the dead. If we

belonged to ourselves, we would give ourselves up to what our hearts

would prefer--weak, human creatures that we are! We would choose to

remember and to mourn. But we are no longer our own! Let us imitate our

husbands! They would certainly have preferred to live. To assert the

contrary is mere boasting. But without hesitating they accepted death.

They understood, every one of them, that they were not their own. Nor

are we our own. I give you my word of honor--and you can never imagine

the object of reverence or the cause of joy that for twenty years my

husband was to me--if I were still young enough to have children I would

marry again to-morrow! I am too old, and this is why you see me take so

much pains in other directions. What the country asks of you is not work

like what I am doing----"

"I prefer that work," said Odette.

"You are not your own."

"What the world asks of me is worse than death."

"Our husbands endured the sufferings of hell, and died only

afterward----"

Odette burst into sobs.

"My child, my dear little friend," said Mme. de Calouas, "I beg you not

to give way to despondency of any sort. Believe what I say, and do not

think me hard, as I may appear to be. I am not hard. I have simply

covered myself with a shell, because we are engaged in a merciless

conflict. Let us not permit ourselves to be weakened whether by

catastrophe or painful loss or bitter trial. To give way to grief is to

grow less strong. For the time, we can be sure only of suffering. Each

grief should give us the opportunity not to weep, but to do more than

before. There is only one aim. How that simplifies things! We look

toward it, and toward it alone. We direct our eyes neither to the right

nor the left. Anything may happen: we are ready, we will not fail. We

may be asked for more than is in reason, but we have offered our

services. No hesitation, no boasting; above all, no consideration of

ourselves; let us leave all that to women of petty minds, since it is

the only motive that can move them. We who know better must set them an

example."

XIX

Odette went to her room to bathe her eyes, but it was all in vain; she

began again to weep; she had an invincible desire for tears; she wept

until the hour for going to the hospital.

She had photographs of Jean in her bed-room as in her drawing-room. And

now it seemed to her that to give way to her grief was, indeed, "a

delight"! She was in the habit of giving herself up to sorrow; who would

have believed that it was a way of giving herself up to pleasure? Yet in

comparison with the excessive sadness of the present time, to wrap

herself up, weeping, in the memory of happy days, was to set herself

apart, to abstract herself in herself, to intoxicate herself with the

fragrance of the incense on her own private altar, to divest herself of

strength for the great common act which it had given her so much pain to

accept, but the imperious command of which she could not now deny.

"It is still a pleasure," she repeated to herself. What chaos must have

been wrought that her most acute sufferings, recalled to her by

imagination, should take on the form of felicity!

Mme. de Calouas had affirmed that, for her part, had she fewer years,

she would not hesitate to marry again!--Ah, no, that was too much!

Anything, anything, but that! "'They endured the pains of hell, and did

not die until afterward?' Yes, their martyrdom, their death, I would

gladly accept for myself; but I refuse to be false to my adored

memories----"

Another burst of grief overwhelmed her in which her whole tortured

personality resisted and asserted itself. She seized Jean's photographs

and kissed them frantically. She would fain detest all the rest of the

world and give herself wholly to this one sacred memory. For the moment

she spurned the opinion of Mme. de Calouas: "If it is a self-indulgence,

let it be so! I yield myself to this self-indulgence! I love Jean, I

have never loved any one but Jean!"

In the old days she used to bicycle with Jean, and the two, side by

side, often exchanging glances, sometimes throwing kisses, would roll

breathlessly along the Norman roads, between the high, thick hedges

where they were as if enclosed, with only one way out, where they had

nothing to do but roll along. An auto would appear; Jean would go first,

Odette following in his track, breathing his perfume until the cloud of

dust and the smell of oil or of gasolene choked her. Sometimes, going

slowly, they would take one another by the hand. She was flexible,

slight, and lightly clothed; she would play acrobatic tricks on her

machine, and her joyful agility would fill Jean with delight. Suddenly

he would jump down, she would follow his example, and they would

exchange a kiss, folded lingeringly in one another's arms. There was a

little wayside inn where, under the arbor, they would call for cider

with bread and white cheese. They had never met any one there; the wind

would ruffle the foliage around them, the dog would gaze at them with a

twinkle in his eye, the hostess would serve them with a smile. More

often than elsewhere they used to go to the orchard, the incomparable

orchard of the farm at the foot of the ruins of Saint-Gingolph, where

they were welcomed as friends, both so young, so beautiful, so radiant

with happiness. There in the autumn they would walk in the little paths

bordered with sorrel and thyme; where dahlias were growing beside

onions, where there were currant-bushes loaded with rubies, in a corner

a fig-tree whose fruit never ripened, under which they must bend to go

to the pear-trees. There Odette would bite into a pear as she passed it,

and this would make Jean scold; he would gather the pear, nibble at the

place which her teeth had damaged, and carry it to the good-natured

farmer's wife, saying: "Just see what mischief we have done!"

"Oh!" the farmer's wife would simply reply, "Madame seems to enjoy it

so!"

Delicious and terrible memories! Odette could not endure again to visit

those places, so near, yet which would now have given her so much pain!

Nor could she again go in the evening, at nightfall, to the edge of the

sea, where in each vague shadow she would have thought she saw the

shadow of Jean. They used to love to wander there in the warm obscurity

of August. The long-drawn moan of the sea was to them a cradle-song

composed by a musician of genius. No doubt Odette used to see in those

days fewer large waves than to-day; but in those days all things blended

with her love and seemed marvellous to her. Sometimes Jean, who had his

boyish ways, would amuse himself by leaving her, suddenly disappearing

from her eyes in the darkness. She would call him in an anxious voice,

"Jean!" And she would always recognize his shadow as he drew near by his

extending his arms in the form of a cross, and throwing them around her,

to press her to him the moment he met her. In those days they would hear

afar off the music of the violins, and would see above the dune the dark

villas and the illuminated hotels. Now she knew that in those hotels

were lying a thousand men swathed in bandages, poisoned by pus and

gangrene, and the sea was holding up a long chaplet of buoys from which

were hanging nets to ward off submarines. How could she go back there?

The summer wore away in a manner almost satisfactory, and with great

hopes in the military operations. A wave of optimism passed over the

country. Rumanian colors were floated from the town-hall; the battle of

the Somme had freed Verdun and was itself beginning to slacken. In the

beginning of October the wounded in the hospital were almost few.

Odette, with too little to do, reduced to solitude, began to droop. She

found the conversation of Mme. de Calouas very fine, but it did not

touch her. Why not?

She would have her lay aside her mourning--the two years being now a

long month over past. Other widows had almost joyfully put off their

crape in the late summer heat. Odette considered it a profanation. "Time

was passing." No doubt it was. It was long--without measure long. But to

her Jean had died yesterday, nothing in her feelings had been changed by

what she had seen. She thought of all those bodily wounds which she had

dressed with her own hands, and which had healed. The great wound within

herself remained open. At times she would forget the war, the sorrows of

which at other times would crush her, and think only of the beloved

being to whom she was bound for eternity.

One afternoon she dragged herself, on foot and alone, along the road to

Saint-Gingolph, between the brook, the fields, and the hillock that

separates two valleys. The weather was fine, underfoot were leaves of

plane-trees, some decaying, others rolling along the ground, driven by

the autumn wind. She had not the courage to go to the farm; the orchard

came down to the roadside. She sat down upon the grass of the ditch and

reflected that this was the third autumn that she had been there, since

the war! She recalled to mind the first one, when people were beginning

to find the hostilities very long; when every evening, passing by the

post-office, one hoped to read the news of some event which would bring

about its sudden end. She thought of the little soldiers whom she used

to follow to the cemetery, and of whom every one insisted upon thinking:

"He is the last one!"

Before her, on the crest of the hillock, like a fantastic screen whose

edge has been clumsily cut by a child, a long avenue of very ancient

elms broke in upon the view. They bore scattered clusters of foliage,

still golden; a dense cloud of crows rose up and lighted with sinister

croakings upon their ragged tops. These birds with their lugubrious

cries seemed about to give battle for the possession of a notable

charnel-house. And suddenly they plunged into the branches and

disappeared, and nothing remained of them but the wound inflicted by the

rasping voices upon the motionless air. Then the black cloud uprose

again, as if the avenue of old elms, mown down at the roots by shells,

had upheaved itself before its final downfall. It seemed as if the heart

of the hillock were painfully throbbing. The raucous croaking of these

thousands of birds grated upon her nerves and aroused all her powers of

mournful revery.

Odette resumed her walk back to the town. Evening was falling. Lush

meadows along the brookside, a gray steeple almost hidden in foliage of

rose ochre, the racecourse--relic of a brilliant worldliness--two or

three pretty villas, whose reddening hopvines were flaunting themselves

derisively before closed windows, reminded her too painfully of a past

era--a lost paradise. Among the persons whom she met, already half

hidden in the shadow, some were laughing. Then people could laugh? Why,

yes! Life, diverse as it is, has ever its source in the waters of a

Fountain of Youth.

The darkness and the croakings of the crows haunted her. When she

reached the cottage she threw herself upon a divan, and remained there,

overcome, until Amelia came to call her to her solitary dinner.

The evening mail brought her tidings of the death of the last de Blauve

boy, who had voluntarily gone to the firing-line in advance of those of

his age, and had been killed outright in the very hour when he first set

foot in the trench. Almost mechanically, and as a daily duty, she read

two newspapers, line by line. She seemed to feel a great inward

emptiness; she felt herself going to pieces. She must make a change, at

whatever cost. There was just now no necessity for her presence in the

hospital. She resolved to return to Paris, without other reason than the

impossibility of remaining in Surville. How many feverish changes she

had made, since the beginning of this war, with no more serious motive

than this!

XX

Arrived in Paris, she went at once to see Mme. de Blauve. This woman,

who had lost a much-loved husband and two sons hardly old enough to be

soldiers, was not weeping, was not feeling dull, had no hard words to

say about the war. She gave full evidence of tenderness toward her

family, but, above all, she knew how to live, and that, in a time of

war, means total forgetfulness of self and of all whom one loves. She

was not sending her daughters into the hospitals, where they were not

needed; she had herself given up her work as nurse, in order to give

special attention to preparing them for marriage.

"Marriage is the civic duty of women," she said; "at sixteen and a half

one can very well have a child. Marriage is a difficult matter in a time

like this, but I am willing to pay the price!" She was thinking only of

this, the oldest girl having passed her fifteenth year.