Sister Gabrielle accosted me this morning with a luminous smile:
"We shall certainly save Number 32's leg. The work of disinfection is
finished. The flesh begins to form again over the wound."
She is radiant. Such are her joys, the only ones she asks of life.
Nothing else exists, or ever will exist for her, and yet her face is
still young. Let us incline our heads before such lives as hers! In a
flash I understand whence comes the deep-seated affinity of soul that
rules between Sister Gabrielle and our soldiers; she has given as they
have given, everything, even themselves. Only in her case, it is for
always and under all circumstances. I ask her what she thinks of Number
3, who seems to me to be picking up a bit. She shakes her head sadly.
"His parents are full of illusions about him, but we can only prolong
things for him, with all our care."
Sad, oh, how sad! A little later Mother Mèchin comes and talks to me in
a low voice about her son.
"Such a good boy, madame! He never gave us one hour of trouble. He
fought so well, they say, and at home he was as gentle as a girl. And
he didn't drink or waste his money. Just imagine, he has saved up a
thousand francs, in little pieces, since he was a child. We didn't
want him to cut into this money to go to the wars. We preferred to go
without things ourselves to fit him out, and let him keep his little
savings. He will be very glad of it when he gets married." Married!
Alas, poor boy! A terrible spouse is waiting for him, one who will not
give him up. But already he has marched before her with as much courage
as now perhaps he guesses at her coming near. He is very feeble, but he
makes a sign that he would like to speak to me. I bend over his bed,
and he whispers in my ear:
"I took communion this morning: I am very glad."
I had just brought him a medal of the Holy Virgin. He smiled with
pleasure, and I am moved to the bottom of my soul, seeing him kiss the
medal and then place it on his heart.
All this time we are making the acquaintance of newer patients, as
they are always coming into this ward, which is reserved for those
that have undergone the most serious operations. "One never has the
consolation of seeing them completely cured," Sister Gabrielle warned
me with a sigh. I stop a moment before a little Turco, who took part in
the battle of the Aisne. Both his legs are broken. His face stiffens
with pain, and now and then a groan escapes him, though it is at once
suppressed. He scolds himself about it, and warns himself, or calls me
to witness, I am not sure which, when I hear him murmuring:
"Just look! When you think of the ones who stayed down there, ought you
ever to groan? We are happier here. It isn't right."
Those who stayed down there! The imagination recoils before the picture
evoked by those simple words; those who stay behind down there in the
cold and the night, under constant menace by the barbarian enemy, who
stay to suffer agonies alone, to die; to see their blood, without the
help even of a single bandage, flow from their broken flesh and fall to
the last drop upon the soil of France. I remember the words of another
wounded soldier:
"After the battle, that day, you couldn't hear yourselves talk any more
in the trenches for the cries of the wounded. It was like one great
uninterrupted wail. You could make out appeals, prayers, calls for
help, women's names. Then, little by little, silence came again, as a
good many of them died. What we heard sound longest on the battlefield,
from one end to the other, was the word 'Mother!' It is always those
who are dying who call like that; we know that well now."
Alas! What do we not know now of the many-sided anguish and horror of
death! We must certainly begin, like the little Turco, to qualify as
lucky the fellows whom destiny delivers up to the hospital. And yet how
they suffer, even these. To physical torture is added too often the
worst tortures of the spirit.
"In the two months I've been away, not one bit of news of my family
has reached me," a soldier told me, "except a despatch announcing my
father's death."
Another had lost a fifteen-year-old son, whom he adored, two hours
before his departure.
"His body was still warm: my wife was as if mad with sorrow."
They tell you these things without complaint. France called them: it
was quite natural to answer her, to go to her out of the midst of
the greatest sorrows, the deepest affections, the keenest happiness;
sometimes, like that young engineer there of twenty, married eleven
months ago to a girl of eighteen, to tear yourself away from a whole
romance! He had been rejected for defective vision, but, and his wife
agreed, he decided this did not matter any more, now that mobilization
was under way, and that he must go. Two days after the birth of a fine
boy--a future soldier, the mother said--he left his life of ease and
tenderness and reported at the barracks as a simple soldier; and he had
been encouraged to do so by that little Parisienne whom we should have
thought absorbed in nothing but society and dress.