PART III Paris (continued 3)

Now it is over, the bad and the good of it, and of all is left only the blue cap and jacket, and the medals of war.

Little Mild Gentleman

The little mild gentleman of teacups and cakes—so useful when there were people who simply had to be asked—always ready to fill a place, considerate of old ladies—of course, they did not want him at the Front. He had rather bad lungs, or something, and was shortsighted at that; it was absurd of him even to try to get out—no army doctor would pass him.

After months and months of effort, he at last succeeded in getting himself taken on for ammunition work and the making of poison gases.

Somebody met him the other day, strutting along in his blue coat and red trousers. Very hurried and important, he had yet to stop and tell all about it, his tea-party manner quite vanished away, his shortsighted eyes no longer mild.

"It is I who tell you," he said, "I who know well, there will not a single one of them be left alive within miles and miles of this new stuff we are making."

Gossip

Since his death she has been nursing in a typhus hospital, somewhere just behind the lines. It is now more than ten months. No one has seen her, scarcely any one has heard from her. Some people say that she is doing "wonderful work" and some people say that it is all pose, and some people say that she has an affair with the chief doctor of the hospital, or is it with the maire of the town? No one has seen her, but every one says she has lost her looks.

She used to be very pretty, and a great favourite in the world. She looked absurdly like her two babies.

The babies are at the château with their grandmother, his mother, who is an invalid—two lovely cherubs at the age of Russian blouses.

The house off the Avenue du Bois, that used to be one of the most charming in Paris, has been closed since the war.

He enlisted when the war broke out, as a common soldier of infantry. It certainly was chic of him, for he was réformé because of some grave enough trouble of the heart, and he might easily have kept out of it all, or have got something showy but not dangerous. However, he took a humble place, and his share of great hardship. He had been accustomed all his life to everything that belongs to wealth and rank, and his share of the burden must have been very heavy for him.

People said: How proud of him she must be. He had always been thought a little dull, a dear boy, but perhaps a little dull; one would not have dreamed he had it in him.

People said: They had always been such a devoted couple, an ideal young couple. How sad it would be if anything happened to him.

In spite of the difficulties due to his being réformé, he got out at last to the Front. He was wounded only a short time after, not in any attack, or with any glory, but in bringing up the comrades' soup to the trenches. It was a shell wound in the thigh, not especially dangerous. He was invalided straight through to Paris, to one of the big city hospitals, and put, of course, in the ward with other common soldiers.

It was a moment of terrible crowding of the hospitals: doctors and nurses were overworked; there was necessarily much confusion. It was no one's fault, perhaps, only the inevitableness of things, that for three days the Surgeon Major had no time himself to attend to the less badly wounded.

The man with the wound in the thigh asked nothing of any one. He did not even ask, they say, to have his people sent for.

They were all down at the château; it was only after forty-eight hours that they got word of what had happened to him and where he was.

His wife came up to town. His mother, of course, was not able to come, and it had not seemed worth while to bring the little boys.

That was when he had been for two days in the hospital.

Here is a part of the thing that people say they do not understand.

It seems as if his wife might have had him moved out of the common ward. It is a little dreadful to think of him there, who had always been used to so much luxury—among the grey blankets, the coarse grey sheets, the beds and stretcher-beds crowded together, a bottle of the hospital champagne on the night-table, the black man in the next bed screaming. She might, it would seem, have had in their own doctor, or any one of the big doctors. She surely might have got permission to stay in the ward and sit by him the night he died.

He died the night after the operation. They had amputated too late. It was only the third day that the chief saw him. They amputated next morning, and he died in the night.

In that hospital they do not put a screen about the bed of one who dies.

If only some one had done something while there was time. It seems such a sad waste of a life, and such a dreary end. You see he had had no glory. It was for bringing up the comrades' soup that he had died. There were no medals to be left after him, with his blue coat and his cap. I suppose there was just one of those coarse grey sheets drawn up over him till they carried him out of the ward.

Some people say he did not want to live. But then he was probably too ill to concern himself much about anything. Some people say his wife did not want him to live. But then she may have been too confused and stunned to be able to concern herself about anything. Some people say she loved another man, and some people say he loved another woman.

Well, from him no one will ever know. It appears also as if no one were likely ever to know from her.

And now, no one sees her or hears from her any more.

His mother, who for a time would not speak of her, says now only that her devotion in the typhus hospital is wonderful, and her self-sacrifice; that she renders incalculable service there, and is above all praise.

That much is true.

And people give all sorts of different, amazing reasons for it.

They all agree, however, upon one point—that she has lost her looks completely.

Smoke

Suddenly, as the motor was passing the Place de la Concorde, Valérie said, "Would you mind if we just went home? I should like to go home."

Of course Nanette could only say that she did not mind.

Valérie had invited her to drive in the Bois and have tea at the little chalet of gaufres, by the gate of the Pré Catelan; she had her mother's motor car for the afternoon, and they need not take anybody with them. Nanette had thought it would be such fun, just the two of them, without governesses or maids. She had been looking forward to it for days.

Nanette was still in the schoolroom, whereas Valérie, nearly two years older, had escaped from all that. The younger girl admired Valérie immensely. They had seen a good deal of one another three years before in a summer at Dinard. Then the difference between their ages had mattered less; but now, dividing the schoolroom girl with her hair just tied back from the girl who would have been going out if war had not ended the world, it invested Valérie with a glamour of romance for the little Nanette. The romance, moreover, was heightened by the fact that people talked rather much of the older girl and coupled her name most unhappily with that of a man she never could marry, who was proving himself to be one of the heroes of the war.

Nanette would have been very proud to have had tea in the Bois with her beautiful friend. She said she did not mind turning back, but she did mind rather. She thought it odd indeed of Valérie to change like that. And Valérie's way of saying it was so odd, as if she had been all the time trying to keep it back and could not.

Valérie spoke through the tube to the chauffeur, and he turned the car.

She, Valérie, talked much and fast as they went back to the rue de Varennes, but she did not tell why she had changed her mind so suddenly.

The court of the old hôtel seemed more than usually boring and solemn to Nanette, and also the dim grave stairway. She would rather have had tea in the salon of the peacock tapestries, but Valérie told the old man-servant to bring it up to her little sitting-room.

She went in at her own door ahead of Nanette, and looked about her as if for something she expected to find in the room. She seemed so odd that Nanette just stood back against the door watching her.

After quite a minute Valérie turned to her and said, "Tell me, does it not seem to you that there is smoke in the room?"

The room was full of the afternoon July sunshine. The window that gave on to the garden was open. There were some arum lilies in a vase, and their fragrance was heavy in the sunshine.

"Why, no," said Nanette, "there is no smoke here."

Valérie began moving about the room aimlessly. As she moved here and there she was taking off her long suède gloves that Nanette admired.

"It is very queer," she said, never looking at Nanette, "but for days, three days, it has seemed to me all the time that my room was full of smoke. I see it and smell it. At first I thought something must be burning somewhere. But there was nothing. Besides, it is not that sort of smoke. It is the smoke of gunpowder."

She had thrown her gloves down on a chair, and was taking off her hat. She pulled the pins out of it, one after the other, and took it off, and thrust the pins back into it. "It is quite different from other smoke," she said, "there is no doubting what it is."

"Gunpowder smoke! Oh, but Valérie——"

Valérie went on, "Sometimes the smoke is so thick in the room that I cannot make my way about; it burns my eyes most dreadfully, it gets into my throat and chokes me, it makes me cry." She tossed her hat into the chair with her gloves, and turned to the mirror over the mantelpiece, and stood with her hands up, fluffing out her lovely gold hair. "It is not only that I cry because I am frightened," she said, "it is also that the smoke actually hurts my throat and eyes."

Nanette, standing behind her, could see her face in the mirror and thought it was become curiously stiff and dull. Valérie's lovely face, usually so full of expression, had become quite blank.

It was dreadful. The younger girl was afraid of—she did not know what. She could think of nothing that would have been of any use to say. She knew the older girl was telling her this thing only because she had to tell it to some one.

"You see," Valérie continued, "that is why I wanted to come home. I cannot bear to be long away from my room, because I am so afraid of missing the moment." She had turned back from the mirror, and stood looking past Nanette.

"The moment?" Nanette repeated, as she did not go on.

"Yes, the moment when the smoke will lift. It is every time more dense. There will be a time when it quite, quite blinds me, and then I shall see." She sat down in the chair that was nearest her. She sat limply, leaning back against the cushions, her hands lying loosely together in her lap.

Nanette had been standing all the time just inside the door. Now she came nearer, but not quite close, and she did not sit down. It was as if there were something encircling Valérie and keeping every one and everything apart from her. Nanette thought of the spells cast about fairy-tale princesses, a circle of magic drawn around, that no one could step across.

Valérie sat rigid, her eyes staring. The clock on the chimney began to strike five.

Nanette sprang forward. "Valérie, Valérie, what is the matter?" But Valérie did not hear her.

Nanette caught her hand. It was icy cold. "Valérie, Valérie!" She let the cold hand go, and touched her cheek.

But Valérie did not feel the touch.

Nanette flew to the door and opened it and called into the passage, "Jeanne-Marie, Jeanne-Marie!"

The old Bretonne nurse came instantly out from her door down the passage.

"Jeanne-Marie, quick, something has happened to mademoiselle."

The old woman passed her, and was beside Valérie. "God and the saints! It has came again!" she cried. She put her arms about Valérie and the girl fell stiffly against her shoulder. "Oh, my lamb, my little lamb!"

"Is she dead?" implored Nanette. "Jeanne-Marie, is she dead?"

"No, no, it has happened before. Go call Francine, quick."

The maid was already at the door; she must have heard the excited voices.

The old nurse said to the maid, "Help me get her to the sofa." To Nanette she said, "Go away, mademoiselle; you must go away."

Nanette besought, "No, oh, no!"

But the maid said, "Please, mademoiselle, Jeanne-Marie knows," and pushed her out of the room as if she had been a child.

Nanette, terribly frightened, waited outside in the passage, walking up and down.

After a long while Francine came and told her that mademoiselle was herself again, but very tired and must rest.

From her own home, an hour later, Nanette telephoned, and was told that mademoiselle was asleep.

The next day Valérie sent asking her to come about five o'clock.

Nanette was taken first to Valérie's mother, in the drawing-room.

The marquise was as stately and frigid as usual, dressed for the street, rather hurried and most difficult to talk to.

She told Nanette that she was troubled about the fright she must have had yesterday, and asked her not to speak to any one of what had occurred. She looked at Nanette through her tortoiseshell lorgnon, and asked if Valérie had been talking to her of anything in particular before she fainted. "Had she been agitating herself with any special confidences?" she asked.

"No," faltered Nanette, wondering.

The marquise went on to explain that Valérie was very much run down just now and nervous, and, in these last days, had had one or two fainting spells, such as that of yesterday, but less grave. She again asked Nanette not to speak of it. She appeared more concerned about people knowing of it, and about something she evidently feared Nanette might have imagined, than about what had happened to Valérie.

Nanette was anxious only to get to Valérie, who wanted her.

She found a little white Valérie snuggled down in the pillows of the big rose-hung bed. She seemed very quiet and rested, not strange as she had been yesterday, only tired. Her brown eyes looked bigger than ever, dark-circled, and her golden hair was very soft and curly about her face, like a child's hair.

She made Nanette sit close to her, and held her hand while she told her strange things, as if they were not strange at all.

When she spoke of yesterday it was as if she were speaking of something that happened very long ago. "I ought not to have brought you home with me," she said, "but you see I was afraid then. I was afraid to be alone. I knew the smoke was going to lift, I knew I was going to be shown something, and I was afraid to go through it alone. Old Jeanne-Marie is a darling, but she is different, of course. And mother would have been so annoyed if I had spoken of him. Mother has known all the time how unhappy we were, you see, and was always awfully annoyed about it."

Nanette, half understanding, could only say, as Valérie paused, "I am so frightened about you."

"Poor Nanette! You must not be frightened, for I am not frightened any more. It is all going to be well, very soon. Only I have got to tell you about it, because I am so lonely. I must tell some one. I am not a bit unhappy any more, but just to-day lonely. I have got to tell you, though it is selfish of me."

"I love you to tell me, please, Valérie."

"I was terribly unhappy," Valérie went on, "when I thought it was only he who would die. I knew, the moment I realized it was gunpowder smoke, that he was going to be killed. I knew that the smoke would lift for me when the moment came, and that then I should see him die."

"Valérie, oh, Valérie!"

"But you need not be sad for me, Nanette, because there is a thing I know that makes it all quite beautiful and right." She lifted herself up from the pillows, still holding Nanette's hand; the two heavy gold braids of her hair fell over her shoulders. "You see, we never could have been happy together, he and I," she said, "there would have been nothing but unhappiness for us both, always. I must tell you what I saw. I must have some one know, and you seem to understand things. You will not speak of it, till afterwards. And now, as I am telling you, you will not interrupt me, will you? You will not say any of the things most people would say, to break into my peace?" She stopped and waited, looking at Nanette intensely.

Nanette could not speak at all.

But Valérie must have understood, for she told it. She told it always quietly, as if she had passed beyond any shock or grief or sense of its strangeness: "The smoke was all about him, and about them; he and they had to fight blindly. They fought with bayonets. It was in the street of a village; I saw the cobbles under his feet, and a broken doorstep. He fought and fought. It seemed very long; he was quite alone to fight against so many of them. There were blue heaps behind him on the cobbles; I could make out just vaguely through the smoke. I think they were his comrades, wounded and dead. The others, the grey ones, were too many. I saw their grey shapes and their bayonets, and his wounds. I saw his face, just as he went down. His face was all alight, as it was the last time I saw him." Her own eyes were shining when she stopped, and her voice was like a singing.

In the quiet of the room Nanette waited, as if there were some spell she was afraid to break.

Valérie told her: "The last time I saw him was when he went out, nearly two years ago. I knew the station he would be passing through, with just some minutes there; and I went, and waited for him. I did not care if people knew. I ran to him in the crowd, and he saw me, and he said, 'Why, my Valérie, it is you!' as if there were a miracle. In my vision, his face was just as it had been then. There was no sound at all in my vision, but from his face, as he died, I knew he was saying, 'Why, my Valérie, it is you!'" Her warm, live hand held Nanette's hand steadily. "I know that I shall go to meet him, that I shall be waiting for him when he dies; I know, Nanette. I know because of the look there was in his face. I shall be waiting there, and he shall see me. And so I have no grief or fear." She was patting Nanette's hand to comfort her. "Is not it strange, Nanette; to-day I have a letter from him, a sad letter. And I have written him a happy one, and he will not understand why at all. He does not know how soon we will be together. I cannot tell him. And I am lonely waiting, now I know. Nanette, I am so glad that it is I who will go first."

Perhaps, when she is older, Nanette will have to wonder if there was something she might have done.

But nothing would have made any difference.

In the next days they had many doctors. But none of the doctors knew what it was, or could do anything.

A week from the day when the smoke had lifted, Nanette sent arum lilies for old Jeanne-Marie to put into Valérie's hands.

And three days after that, the man Valérie never could have married was killed.

He had gone down, it was known afterwards, in house-to-house fighting, in a street of the village of X——.

Hospital, Saturday, July 8th

Some new ones are arrived from the Somme, only ten for my ward, the orderly told me at the gate. They were brought in at four o'clock this morning. The orderly, Hamond, said, "They are nothing so bad as the Verduns."

When I came to the top of the stairs, Madame Marthe was in the corridor, waiting for Madame Bayle to come and unlock the linen-press. She looked very tired already, at the beginning of the day, and she was walking up and down between the stairs and the door of our ward, not able to keep still for a minute.

She told them off on her small fine fingers, stained with iodine: "Two heads, one of them has a bad leg-wound also; one amputé of the arm, infected; two of the leg, infected both of them; two faces; a bad chest-wound, bullet; other two slight. Zut! that Madame Bayle, will she never come! Run over to the store-house and tell them I have got to have tubes and funnels to feed the 9 and 14. See that they give them to you, whatever fuss they make, tell them it is for very bad faces. Quick now, the chief has been around, and they are going to trepan the worst head this morning."

Hospital, Sunday, July 9th

The man they trepanned yesterday will not keep still; he worries about everything. They say he is doing well, but he talks all the time. They told me to sit by him and try to make him stay quiet. At first he held my hand and seemed to rest, but he would not shut his eyes, and after a little he began to talk again.

He was worried because he thought I had not enough to eat; he thought, because I was so thin, that I must be very poor. He said he had some biscuits and some rillettes de Tours done up together in a piece of newspaper. The package had been in his musette when he went into the charge. Where was his musette? He would have me go and find it, and eat the biscuits, and the rillettes de Tours. He worried because he had fallen back into a trench deep with water, and the newspaper package might have got wet. But I must not mind that, he said, it was better than starving. What had they done with his musette? I must go and get it. And I must not mind taking his biscuits and rillettes de Tours, for he was not hungry at all.

Monday, July 10th

All day long there has been sunshine, and the sky has been blue. There were great white clouds that mounted up over the city, and that one kept imagining was the smoke of battle. The blue of the sky was wonderful, infinite and near, like something of music or of religion, and the sunshine was like golden wine. But those soft white puffs of cloud were terrible.

At the top of the Champs Elysées, behind the Arch, the clouds were driven up as if it were from the mouths of cannon.

It must be just like that the smoke is rising in the sunshine over the high edge of a field I used to know. They say that field is laid across everywhere with railroad tracks, along which monster grey cannon crawl up to their positions, and crawl back across again when their work is done. Hundreds of horses are corralled in the field, and everywhere there are dotted little white tents. Sometimes black faces come to the openings of the tents, and one would think of the Village Nègre people went to see in Magic City, ages and ages ago.

It seems strange that when the great white clouds mounted up from behind the Arch of Triumph, the city did not rock beneath them. It seems strange that the great white clouds rose silently and really were only clouds.

Thursday, July 13th

People in the streets go slowly, looking up at the flags, and stopping to stand. They speak to one another wherever they happen to be standing together, and say that they hope to-morrow will be a fine day.

The streets are getting ready for to-morrow, hanging out flags and streamers and garlands to the breeze that is strong to-day, and to the comings and goings of sunshine. Grey minutes and gold minutes follow one another across the city, where the flags of the different nations are blending their colours and waving all together.

Many different uniforms, on their way up and down the streets, salute one another, and stop and linger about together, looking at their flags.

The streets are full of bandages and crutches, pinned-up trouser-legs and pinned-up coat-sleeves, steps that halt along with tap of canes, and shuffling, uncertain steps that must be led.

One is always coming in the streets upon an especial type of little group of people, one might indeed think each time that it was the same little group over again, so much each different one of them resembles all the others—four or five women, an old man, a young sick-looking man, and quite a tagging on of children. One knows that they are refugees. They have the unmistakable look of refugees. It gives them all that likeness, every little dragging tribe of them to every other. It is the look of people who are waiting for something, and to whom nothing in the meanwhile matters. They are indifferent and dull because nothing else matters. They make no effort and take no trouble—of what use? It is not worth their while to better things that will not last. There is always a woman in poor rusty deep mourning who has tied her little girl's hair with a Belgian ribbon.

Music comes and goes at odd times through the streets, as pipe and drum and trumpet of to-morrow's procession are moved this way and that to their various places.

You get fragments of strange music, sometimes come from very far-away strange countries, to these streets.

Friday, July 14th: Pink Shoes

It would be too unkind of it to rain, as if the fête were not already shadowed enough.

One was angry waking in the rain.

It rained when they took their wreaths and flowers to the statues of Strasburg and Lille, and it rained when the troops were massed before the Invalides for the prise d'armes.

But afterwards the rain did stop.

A girl and a limping soldier, ahead of us as we went to the Nord-Sud, were sopping wet. I suppose they had been standing for hours on the Esplanade. Her knitted cape and cotton blouse were quite soaked through. She had no hat, and she was laughing because her brown curls dripped into her eyes.

In the Place de la Concorde people had put down their umbrellas, and were telling one another that it was really better not to have the heat of sunshine.

We waited a little with the crowd in the Place, the friendly, orderly Paris crowd that used to come to fêtes so gaily, grave now, almost solemn. The crowd was full of wounded. The men flung back out of the war, broken, were come to watch their comrades pass between two battles. The crowd gave place to them, and they were proud in it.

Then Diane came, with Miss and the babies, both of them tremendously excited in their little mackintosh coats.

One of the club servants showed us to the small writing-room, where a window had been reserved for us. From the window we looked down on the wide grey stream of the street between banks of people. One way we could see the great Place kept clear also, in grey reaches, past islands of crowd, and the other way we could see a heap of people on the steps of the Madeleine.

The babies sat on the window-ledge and forgot everything at once because of another baby, down in the crowd on the opposite kerb, who wore a pink bonnet and pink shoes, and had a little flag in either hand.

"Oh, mummy, her mummy has put down a newspaper for her to stand on, so the wet won't hurt her shoes."

"Yes, Cricri darling. Don't wriggle so, child; Miss, do watch out for her."

"I've got pink shoes, too, haven't I, Fafa?"

Diane, holding Fafa very tight on the window-ledge—not because he wriggled, he was too big, but because he might have been grown up, like the little boys of other mothers, and gone away to war—was telling him what a wonderful thing it was he had come to see, and how, when he was a big man, he would always remember it, and could say to people, "On the 14th of July, 1916, I saw——"

"Yes, mummy! Oh, mummy, do you suppose that little girl's shoes are quite new for to-day?"

"Babies, you are going to see Belgian soldiers; you will always and always remember what they did for us. And there will be British soldiers; you know how they are fighting for us, just the same as papa and Uncle Raoul. And you will see the Russians, who have come from so far away to help us; and beautiful Hindus, and big Africans, and the little Anamites, and our own men."

Her voice thrilled when she said "our own men."

Her voice has that curious quality of drawing darkness: it made me feel the shadows when she said like that, "our own men."

She said, "There will be the fusilliers marins, and the cuirassiers, and the artilleurs. You may see the 75', Fafa. And there will be the chasseurs à pied, from Verdun, with their fourragère."

"Mummy, was it her mummy who gave her the little flags?"

"I think so, Fafa darling."

"Is it her mummy there with her?"

"I think so."

"Is her papa gone to the war, like my papa?"

Diane put her cheek down against the top of his little fuzzy head as she stood with her arms around him.

"Is her papa gone to the war too, mummy?"

"I think so."

"She has to stand up all the time, mummy, will she not be tired? I am afraid she will be tired before the procession comes. When will the procession come, mummy?"

Diane said to me, "To think it is the first day of flags and music we have had since the war began——"

I was thinking all the time of the day when the troops will come home. I was thinking that this day was a promise of that day. I knew that Diane was thinking of that also. Her eyes filled with tears; I saw them through the tears that were in my own eyes. We both knew so well. The men look forward fearlessly to that day, but the women know fear. Every woman in the crowd was thinking how this day promised that day, gloriously; and every one was thinking—but if he does not come home.

The people were come to their day of flags and music almost as if it were to some religious ceremony. They waited in the grey morning to see their troops go by; coming from battles, going back again to battles, and always with the war so close that, if it were not for the sounds of the city, we could have heard its thundering.

Diane said, because she did not want the children to think she was sad, "The little pink girl must have come very early to have got so good a place."

"Mummy, did she have a nice breakfast before she came?"

"Oh, yes, a lovely breakfast."

"Will the procession never come, mummy dear? That little girl must be so tired. Why doesn't the procession come, mummy?"

"Oh, there's the sun," Cricri sang out, wriggling in Miss's arms, and clapping her hands. "There's the sun come out!"

The sun shone straight into our eyes for a few minutes, and then the soft grey settled down again.

We heard the sound of music and of marching, from a long way off.

The crowd stirred and thrilled.

"They are coming," cried the babies, "they're coming!"

"Yes, yes, they're coming. What is that the band plays? There's the Garde Républicaine, and the music—listen, babies! And now it is Belgian music. There are the Belgians—see the people run out to give them flowers! There are the mitrailleuses and the Lanciers and the Cyclistes!"

"Mummy, I've got a bicycle too, haven't I; and I can ride it well, can't I?"

"Now the English, with their music! Cricri, do keep still and let Miss see. How beautifully they march! Aren't you proud, Miss? There are the Ansacs, Fafa; and look at the Indians! The street is carpeted with flowers: they cannot pick them up, they walk over them. There are the Russians. Look, babies, the little boys and girls from the crowd run out and pick up the flowers to give them! Listen, the Russian music sounds like great seas and winds in forests. It will be our own men coming now, Fafa."

"Mummy, oh, mummy! I can't see the little girl any more!"

"Now it will be our own men coming! Look, look, babies, to see the very first of them! There's our own music—listen."

Holding Fafa close against her shoulder, she leaned out past him over the window-ledge, her eyes lighted with that flame one knows in soldiers' eyes.

"They will be our own men, who have fought for us, who will go back to fight for us. Fafa, think of it! Here they are, their music—oh, oh, it is the Chant du Départ!"

"Mummy, do you think we'll never any more see the little girl with the pink shoes?"

Monday, July 17th

Twenty-eight beds and ten stretcher-beds, the ward is full again. They are all from the Somme. They are not nearly so bad as those from Verdun and the Champagne. There has been only one of them, so far, who died.

He was brought in on Wednesday, they operated next morning, and he died in the night. The wound had become gangrenous.

He was twenty-five years old. He was from the invaded countries, and had no one, no one at all, who could come. He had had no news of his people since the beginning of the war, nor had he been able to send his news to them. He had never been out of his little commune, except to go to the trenches. He had no name to give of any friend.

The patronne told me to go to the funeral, for there was no one else to go. None of the real nurses could be spared, and very few of the men from downstairs would be able to walk so far. It was to be at Pantin. We would go first to the church. We would leave the hospital at half-past three.

I tell of so many funerals. But there are so many, and they impress me so. Those men die for us, and we, who may not die—how could it be but that their dying means more to us than other things? There is nothing we can do for those who fall and lie on the battlefield. But with these, here, we go a little way.

And what else is there?

I have got some decent clothes, and I go sometimes to see some one, and we pretend we are amused by bits of gossip. We say, "Oh, that's a hat from Rose-Marie!" and, "Where did you get your tricot?" But it is as if we went on a journey, and we come home tired from it, to the dark shelter of our thoughts.

One rests better following through endless poor streets after a pine-box with the flag upon it and the palms.

The people stand back, the men salute, the women make the sign of the Cross, and we keep our own small perfect silence with us as we pass. The piquet d'honneur walked with arms reversed, four on either side of him.

There was no one but me to bring him flowers, but he had a big fine tin wreath from his comrades of our service, and his palms from the Ville de Paris, and the spray of zinc flowers with the ribbon marked "Souvenir Français" that, Madame Bayle said, is always sent from the Ministère de la Guerre.

Madame Bayle came with us. She is fat and always ill, but she could be spared from the linen-room. I never had seen her before "en civil." She had a large black hat from which, she told me, she had, for the occasion, taken off fourteen red roses. I thought, as we walked together, "Why, she and I are bitter enemies! For nine months we have quarrelled every day!"

We walked together, close behind the boy, who had no one but we two and five of his comrades to follow him.

It was hot, there was no air at all. There was a terrible odour of disinfectant.

Madame Bayle said, "It is because of the gangrene," and quite worried for fear I could not stand it.

And I worried about her bad knee. Was it bad to-day? I was afraid she would be very tired.

We felt most sympathetically about each other.

She kept saying, "It is all the same sad, it is all the same sad."

One of the wounded said, "Not so sad as to lie out for the crows in no-man's-land."

The Garde Républicaine, standing at attention, formed an aisle for him and for us to pass through into the church. Of course, they never come into the church.

Madame Bayle, kneeling stiffly beside him, went on whispering, "C'est tout de même triste," as if it were a sort of prayer. "C'est tout de même triste d'être seul comme ça."

An old woman appeared from somewhere and put a little bunch of marguerites on his flag, and went away again. The stems of the marguerites were done up in white paper. Some women came and stayed; and some little girls, and a troop of small boys, in black blouses, just let out from the school opposite.

When it was over, they all filed out, past Madame Bayle and me, as we stood in the place where would have been his people.

On and on we went, through streets always sadder and more sad as they frayed out at the edge of the city.

Madame Bayle always shuffled and panted, and the wounded followed more and more slowly.

The city gate, and the ramparts, and longer, wider, even sadder streets to pass along, over the cobbles; then an avenue of limes in fragrant blossom, and the entrance of the great cemetery.

The piquet d'honneur left us at the gate, and we were just ourselves to go on with him to the place where the soldiers who are lonely like him lie, so many of them together.

It is a beautiful place. When his people can come to him I think they will be proud to find him in so beautiful a place.

We put our flowers with him, and went away Madame Bayle always saying, "C'est triste tout de même, d'être comme ça, tout seul."

The wounded went so fast ahead of us out of the cemetery that Madame Bayle could not keep up at all.

She panted, "They are so glad to get out of it, poor boys, poor boys. They will wait for us at the entrance; We will go all of us together to the café on the right of the entrance for our 'little glass.'"

Thursday, July 20th: Little Florist

Very early this morning, on my way to the hospital, I stopped at the little florist's shop round the corner, near the church, to get some blue and purple larkspur and crimson ramble-roses.

It was so early, I was afraid Jeannette would not yet be back with the day's flowers from the great central markets.

It is Jeannette, the younger, pretty sister, who goes every morning to choose the fresh flowers, and Caroline, who in the meanwhile puts the little shop in order to receive them, washing their window and filling their bowls and vases with water, and scrubbing out the floor.

Caroline is not yet twenty-five years old, and Jeannette is eighteen. They are quite alone now to keep the little shop.

Their father is paralyzed, helpless, and they must take care of him.

The brother, who used to take care of them all, is at the war.

Just two years ago, in the early summer, before the war, I remember that Caroline, who is not really pretty at all, suddenly came to be quite beautiful. Her small dark thin face was aglow, as if her heart were full of sunlight, and she moved about the shop in a way so glad that it seemed as if every little humble thing she had to do were become for her part of a dance. She gave away to one then more than one bought of larkspur and ramble-roses, and Jeannette and the big brother looked on leniently.

All that seems now very long ago.

So few people can bear happy colours in these days, that Jeannette brings back from the market little else but white and purple flowers, and green leaves for wreaths and crosses.

I was very early this morning, and Jeannette was not yet come back from the Halles.

Caroline was down on her knees, scrubbing the floor. She was crying as she scrubbed the floor.

She had not expected any one to come so early, and she was crying just as hard as she could cry, while she was alone and had the time.

She got up from her knees and rubbed her bare arm across her eyes.

I thought of her brother at the war, and of the some one because of whom, perhaps, she had been happy, two years ago. I scarcely dared to ask, "Is it bad news, Caroline?"

"No, Madame," she said, still rubbing her eyes, "No, Madame, it is nothing special. It is only as if there were nothing but tears in the world."

Trains

Two trains are side-tracked in the fields, beyond the little country station, where the wheat is already bronzed and heavy-headed, and the poppies flame through it, and where there is all the music of grasshoppers and crickets and birds.

One is a train of men coming back from the Front on leave, and very gay. They are all laughing and singing in the carriages. They are all getting themselves tidied up, for shortly they will be in Paris. The officers in several of the carriages have managed to get some water, and are scrubbing luxuriously, with tin-cups and soup-plates for basins. Soapy faces appear at the windows. The men have opened the carriage doors all along the train and got out to tumble about in the grass at the edge of the train. They pick buttercups that grow close to the rails, and some of them have wandered off into the tall wheat to gather poppies.

The second train on the siding is full of wounded, who must wait, like the permissionnaires, to let pass the munition and troop trains going out. The wounded are quite comfortably arranged on their tiers of stretchers; the doctors and orderlies have all the needed things, and move about competently, up and down the train. It is strange how quiet the train of wounded is. It is only here and there along it that one hears moaning or a cry.

A munition train crawls by, all grey. It is nothing that the permissionnaires or wounded need notice.

Then, after a time, that seems very long, comes a troop-train going out. The men in the troop train hang out of the windows and look silently upon all the things they are passing in the fields, that seem so full of peace and so kind.

They wave to the permissionnaires, who are silent for a moment, watching them as they go. And then they pass the train of wounded, some of whom look up at them.

Monday, July 24th—5.30 of the morning

Pérot has just gone.

He was noiselessly creeping down the outside stairs from his attic room. But I was waiting at the door on the landing, and made him come in for a minute to the apartment.

He sat, loaded down with all his campaign things, in the little yellow chair, and I sat in the big yellow chair, and we looked at one another.

It is odd how one never can say any of the things to them; and how, always, they understand perfectly all the things one would say if one could.

He looked very ill, poor boy. Ten days' leave of convalescence after five months in the hospital has really not given him enough time to pick up. And he worries so. He can try to eat, but he cannot sleep at all. All night he thinks and thinks.

I know so very well just what he thinks.

He has never had many words with which to tell me, for he has had all his short life to work so hard that he could get little time for learning to express himself. But sometimes he says, "If I knew they were dead——"

They are his two little sisters. The mother died five years ago, the father several years before that. He helped his mother when he was still a schoolboy to take care of the little sisters, Célestine and Marie; and when the mother was dead he took care of them alone. Now he is twenty-four years old, and Célestine is seventeen and Marie sixteen.

Since the day he left, two years less just eleven days ago, he has had no word of them at all.

Others from those invaded countries have had perhaps messages, a postal card, some sort of a letter; but he had had no word.

An application we got through for him to the maire of the nearest large town has had only the answer that the farm exists no more and that nothing has been known of the two young girls.

It was the "le mauvais sang qu'il faisait," as Madame Marthe said, that kept him so long from getting well. His wound in the shoulder was pretty bad, but what was worse was his unceasing grief and dread. He would have died, of the wound and that, if he had not been so young and northern and strong.

His wound got itself well. The new ones needed his place in the hospital. He was given ten days' sick leave, and came to spend it in the room upstairs, because he had nowhere else to go.

Now his leave has come to an end, and he is going back to his depôt, and then to the Front. I may never see him again, my poor boy, whose face goes white and red, and white and red, and whose blue northern eyes fill with tears if one speaks kindly to him.

He sat in the little yellow chair and I sat in the big yellow chair, and we looked at each other in the wet grey early morning.

I said, "They gave you a good breakfast?"

"Oh, yes, madame."

"And your little package, for lunch in the train?"

"Oh, yes, madame, and the cigarettes."

"Some letter-paper to write to me on?"

"Yes, madame."

"You have all the money you need, you are sure, my child?"

"Oh, yes, madame, much more than I need. I still have that twenty francs."

"You promise to let me know if I can do anything for you?"

"Yes, madame."

"And you will take care of yourself, please, Pérot."

"Yes, madame."

The clock struck once, the first quarter hour past five.

"You must go, my child."

He stood up.

I went to the door with him.

"You would not have liked me to come to the train, Pérot?"

"No, madame, because I should have cried; I am so stupid, madame."

"I would have cried too. And so, my child—until a less sad day."

"Madame—thank you."

"No, I thank you, little soldier."

Wednesday, July 26th

This morning, at the hospital, one of the Verdun men came up from the convalescent ward downstairs, where he was sent when they evacuated for the Somme, to say good-bye to us. He is well enough, and he is going back. He is one of the older men, one of those who have the look of worrying about wives and babies. He has been twice wounded. The first was a bad wound; he had taken long to get over it in some hospital of the provinces, and to be able to go back and be wounded again. Now he is going back for the third time.

I remember his having told me, at first, when he was quite ill and talked with fever, that he was terribly afraid of Verdun. He said he did not mind what they did with him if only they did not send him back to Verdun. He said he was afraid of the bayonet. He could kill with the gun, he said, but not with the bayonet. He said he stood paralyzed when it was the moment to strike with the bayonet, and could not strike.

It was after he left my ward that his wife had come up from the Limousin, and brought the two little girls to visit him. I never saw her, but I remember how happy he was. He told me his wife could not stay long because she had to go back and take care of the cows. They had two cows, he said.

Now he bade good-bye to Madame Marthe, who was washing her hands with sublimé after a dressing, and who gave him a sharp red elbow to shake.

He said good-bye to the men in the ward, each one in turn, and stood a minute looking at his old place and said, "One was well off there."

I went to the door with him.

It was very hot in the ward, and there were flies buzzing.

I thought: To be going back to that, when one knows it already; to be going back to that, when one has no longer youth's élan and carelessness; when one has to worry over labour and poverty left behind.

I suppose he saw something in my face of what I felt, for he said, in a kind, pitying way, as if to help me, "Do not be sad, madame." And he said the thing they all say, all of them, "I' faut b'en, tous les copains sont là."

"All the others are there."

And then, this afternoon, I heard another soldier say that.

It was in the rue de la Paix. He was giving an order to the chauffeur. His little boy, in a white piqué dress with a big lace collar, was standing beside him, dancing up and down and hanging on his hand.

His wife leaned out of the window of the motor and called to me as I passed, and he turned. I stopped, and we talked for a minute.

He has been home on a six days' leave and is going back to-night.

He is a captain in the chasseurs à pied. Before the war he was an officer in a smart cavalry regiment, but he had himself transferred into the infantry when the war began. I have heard the men in the hospital talk of him. They say, "C'est un type épatant, celui-là." They say he never sends his men to reconnoitre, but goes himself, always.

He looked very young and splendid in his smart uniform, standing at the door of the motor.

The little boy, always dancing up and down beside him, said, "We've got his picture taken! We've got his picture taken!"

His wife tried to laugh but I saw her eyes in the shadow of her white lace hat. "It's true," she said, "we dragged him to it, poor boy. We had nothing decent of him at all, you know."

She was very lovely in her lovely things, with a heap of red roses beside her on the seat of the motor.

Somehow, that it was all so pretty made it sadder. In the bright street I thought: To go back to that, when one has so much, when one has everything in the world, and is young and full of radiant life.

His wife and I looked at each other.

He smiled down at her, as if it were only for her one need be sorry. "We have had six perfect days," he said, "and you know it must be—the others are there."

I have written those words many times over. But they are the words one hears every day. As the men go back, each one of them from the however different circumstances of his life, that is all they seem to find to say about it. It does not make a fine phrase, but it has come to mean for me a beautiful thing. Behind the great sweep of battles it is one of the things I shall always be glad to have known.

I find myself wanting to put each saying of it away with other memories in this book that for two years has kept me company.

Two years ago—so long ago that I find myself saying, once upon a time—there was a small square tower room that had three windows, narrow and deep-set, the loopholes of ancient defences. Once upon a time the three windows stood open to the night and the garden, and to a sense, somehow, of the friendly crowding up of the little town about the rampart walls, and to the country lying away beyond, sweet in the dark with forest and field.

I know that where war has passed strangers can look into broken houses and see all that was intimate and small and dear betrayed with ruin of stones and lives, and that, like that, people who do not care may glance in passing into the wreck of the north tower room.

The tower had stood for so long, keeping watch over that road to Paris—how strange to think it will keep watch no more! It had looked down, in its long time, on much of war, and held its own through three besiegings—and now it is fallen.

Now it is fallen, the strong tower, in a land that is laid waste, from which peace has been taken away, and joy, out of the plentiful fields.

Already that night was passed beyond the end of the world.

In the morning of that day, the morning of that last Sunday of peace, I had stood in my window over the garden and seen the sunshine, thick and golden after rain, on wet sweet things, lawns and little formal stately paths and box edges and clipped yews, roses and heliotrope and petunias. And I had not known. I had seen the close, soft dream-sky of France full of white clouds above the tops of trees that were green and golden, or sometimes as dark as purple and black. And I had not known.

The white peacocks were spreading their dreams of tails below the terrace, between the crouching sphynxes that years and years of moss and ivy and rose-vines had grown over.

There had been church bells ringing to the voices of the garden, its birds and bees and grasshoppers. And I had not known.

Against the rampart walls I could see, between the trees, the town roofs gathered close, rust-red ancient tiles and thatch that time and weathers had made beautiful, and crooked chimney-pots and blue smoke rising straight and high in the still, blue air.

I could hear the little sounds of the village, together with the garden sounds and the bells.

I could smell hearth fires and fresh-baked bread, together with the new-cut grass and heliotrope and roses.

Every sound had been part of the stillness; all the lines and colours of things belonged together in that soft harmony which is so especially of France. I had thought, how it was France! And I had not known.

I had gone to Mass in the little ancient, dusky church of the village. I had gone down across the parterres, and along the avenue of limes, through the summer woods that were so happy and alive, out at the little green gate in the rampart walls, and down the street of big square old cobbles, between the nestling houses.

And in the church there had been incense and candles, and the white caps of old women, and the wriggling of the children in their Sunday clothes.

When I came back, there were the papers arrived from Paris. And nothing again was ever, ever, to be the same.

That night, not knowing why, I wanted to write down for my own memory notes of just those little things that seem so small, and that went all together to the making of a mood we can no more find to turn to.

I wanted to write of the fragrance of delicate years that abode in my tower room; of the dim, cloudy mirror over the mantel that had reflected so many stories; of how the writing-table stood in the north window, and had nothing but a bowl of sweet-peas and my travelling-desk things on it; and that the window was open, and how all the wet, sweet, quite cold night came in; and that, over the tops of the dark trees, and between the dark cloud masses, I could see all the stars of the Lyre, Vega, blue-white, very big and near, all more brilliant, I thought, than ever I had known them before. I wanted to explain how, somehow, one felt the village, down under the rampart walls, though it slept and made no sound, and how friendly its presence was as it lay so close, protecting and protected, about its ancient burg.

Now the houses are roofless, and the rampart walls are broken. The tower is fallen. Nothing is left unchanged there, to-night, but the shining down of the August stars.

I had dreamed of the hoofbeats of galloping horses and crash of great wheels and of thunder. And all that came, and does not cease. I had dreamed of blood on the castle stairs, dripping and dripping. And they say that there was one night especially, when the castle was so full of wounded men, that there was nowhere left to lay them in any of the rooms, or in the lower halls. They carried them as they were brought in up the stairs to lie on the floor of the Long Gallery. And the blood ran down the stairs.

There was fighting, over and over, up and down, those big square cobbles of the streets and of the market place, and from the doors and windows and roofs of those little houses.

The people of the streets and houses are gone, who knows where, with their poor small bundles, fled long ago, before the hoofbeats and wheels and thunder.

Across these things, how absurd to remember the sweet-peas there were, that Sunday night, in a bowl on a writing-table!

It was very hot in the ward to-day; the flies buzzed horridly up and down the window-panes.

It was a very bad day in the ward. Thirty-four was very low. He had a hæmorrhage yesterday, and all day he seemed to be sinking. It was to-day he received his Croix de Guerre. The captain came up to the ward with another officer and gave it to him, and read his citation out, standing by the bed. But he seemed scarcely to know.

Several other decorations were given also to-day, downstairs in the Salle de Jeu. We had much to do in our ward, and I could not go down.

Our little 17 received his Cross and also his Military medal. He managed to get downstairs and stand up with the others, most of them like himself on crutches. Yesterday he had news of his mother's death. He told me he had never had a father. "Il du être un salaud, ce type-là," he told me. His only brother had been reported missing since more than a year. He kept calling me over every few minutes—when he was back in the ward, and in his bed, very tired—to show me his medals in their two green boxes. He had no one of his own to whom to show them.

There was much big work to be done, and the ward was so clouded all day with the choking blue smoke of iodine from the hot washings and dressings.

Madame Marthe was very nervous, and Madame Alice seemed especially sullen.

I wondered—was it that her poor little Jeanjean is worse again, there, where he has been all these months, in the children's hospital, cared for by others than she?

I was thinking all the day of it, and never dared to ask her.

Madame Marthe stood all day by the bed of 34. She would say to him, "Now breathe, breathe. Now breathe." If ever she stopped saying it, for one instant, he stopped breathing. It was as if the only thing he understood was that he must obey her.

Madame Alice did all she possibly could of her work for her, sullenly, together with her own hard work.

It was a very bad day; I am proud to belong in such days.

I was thinking very much of the garden of the sphynxes and white peacocks, that is in ruin, and of the tower room given over to bats and swallows.

It was beautiful, that mood which is gone, but this is more beautiful.