Hospital
My hospital was, all of it, built in the time that means lovely things of red-brick and grey stone and blue gables. The courtyards are paved with huge ancient cobbles, and there are grass plots that are green and wet, and big trees and bushes whose leaves are falling slowly in blue stillness.
There are more than two thousand sick in my hospital, six hundred wounded of the war, one hundred and fifty of them in our service.
I love to write "my" hospital and "our" service.
Madame Marthe
Hospital, Tuesday, October 19th
Things had been very bad all day. When night came it seemed dreadful to go away and leave so much suffering. I thought of the night, with fever and that special helplessness which belongs to the night.
I would have been so glad to stay the night out with the ward.
I said that to Madame Marthe, as we left together.
She said, "But why?"
She always has a cold and wears a little blue woollen cape over her blouse and apron. When she leaves the hospital she pins up the two black ribbon streamers of her cap of the tri-couleurs and wraps her arms around in the blue woollen cape. She looks very small and cold and poor.
"Why?" she asked.
The hospital is her world and she is thankful for every minute she can get away from it.
I leave my world to come to it.
I was ashamed to say to her, "It is for my own comfort I want to stay, to make myself imagine that I really am needed."
Hospital
Things They Say
Perhaps in other, different kinds of hospitals, hospitals of the little good sisters, or of ladies of the Red Cross, hospitals of beautiful influences, one could not love the men so much. In hospitals where the beautiful things of the Faith, prayers and tenderness and peace, are all around about the pain and death; and there are words for praise of courage and sacrifice, and words for sympathy and for hope, and words for high ideals; where it is as poets and painters and all people have always imagined it, perhaps one could not get quite this understanding of things that are not said, or come in so rough and vivid a way, upon unimagined things.
One loves to think of the wounded soldier with the nun beside him, and of the lady of the great world tending the peasant hero. One loves to hear of the men saying, "C'est pour la France."
Here there are no pictures I would dare call beautiful. It is crude and raw. And things are not said. When there is not too much suffering, it is rough. And when the suffering is great, it is all very dumb.
Here there is no one who knows how to word things. The men do not know, and the nurses do not know how to tell them. They all only just go on.
The nurses are poor women, of the people. They come, each one of them, from her own small desperate struggle for life, each from her own crushing deadening small miseries and cares, without any help of dream and vision, callously—one, just looking on, might think—to their work in the hospital. To the great magnificent suffering, each one of them comes dulled and hardened by some small sordid helpless suffering of her own. Everything has always been a struggle, and this is just part of it. They work on every day, and all day long, with no one to put into words for them, devotion and sacrifice. No one here speaks of those things, or thinks of them, or even knows.
When I see my little Madame Marthe, my chief, so very tired, I say to her, "You work so hard." And she always says, shrugging her thin round shoulders, "Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, i' faut b'en. Nous sommes là pour ça." If I dared to tell the patronne, who is intelligent to bitterness, that I admired this she did or that, she would say, "What of it, we are paid for that."
Odd how often it is the same thing that people say.
When I ask of a man with the Croix de Guerre what he did to win it, he always says, "Je n'ai fait que comme les autres."
A man going back does not say to us here that he is glad to have his life to offer again for his country. But he says that thing which makes me catch my breath with pride in him. "Je veux b'en. Tous les copains sont là."
They go off like that, to those places of death that they know already, wherein they have seen things we dare not imagine, and all they say about it is that all the copains are there.
There are not many of my ward who go back, ours are the very badly wounded, the men who are out of it.
The men have done all that they could do. Every one of them did all that he could do, and kept on doing it as long as he could. And when he could do no more, why then he was out of it, and it was for others to take up and go on with. He himself was done with it. He would rather not talk about it. It had been so bad that he does not want to talk about it. He does not want to think about it any more.
He would rather talk about things that used to happen "dans le pays," about the vines or the corn, or the fishing boat with oars or with sails, and "la vieille" and "les petiots."
"It is pretty bad?" I say, perhaps, to this one or that one, when I see how he is suffering.
I have never heard one of them say, "C'est pour la France."
But what they always, always say, all of them, is a thing I think very beautiful.
"You suffer much, my child?"
"Pas trop, Madame."
Always it is, "Not too much."
But sometimes it is too much, and they cannot bear it.
And when I look at the bed that used to be his, I think of him lying there trying to smile and to say that his suffering was not too much.
And the new man in the bed says those same words, as if it were a little formula always an answer to the question I cannot help asking.
"You suffer much?"
"Not too much, Madame."
Sometimes they say, "Ca va aller mieux."
"Ca ne va pas, mon petit?"
"Ca va aller mieux."
There is only one thing that is like the things one reads of. It is that the men, when they are very, very bad, always, always call for their mothers.
I remember reading that somewhere, and thinking it was just something somebody had thought pretty to write.
But it is one of the most true and simple and beautiful things that there can be in the world.
It is strange too. When they suffer desperately, they keep saying, "My mother, my poor mother," as if it were she who suffered. They seem to be grieving for her, not for themselves.
When they are frightened they call for her. Some of them are frightened of taking chloroform. They have fought and not been afraid, they would not be afraid to die, but chloroform is different.
Joseph opens the double doors of the ward and pushes the stretcher cart in and calls the number this or that.
He is all ready and waiting.
Joseph lifts him from the bed to the cart. I double a pillow under his head and wrap the blanket over, and follow.
The doors at the other side of the hall are closed, and I run ahead to open them, and shut them behind again after the cart.
If I can make an excuse I go down the corridor and wait also at the door of the operating room. I know the men hate to wait there alone. Sometimes there is very long to wait. And Joseph has to go to do other things.
Sometimes the door of the operating room is ajar, and one can see in a little, and that is horrible. People go in and out, the doctors, and Madame Laure, fetching and carrying things. The stretcher of the man who has been taken in is left pulled back against the wall, by that of the man who is waiting his turn. I stand very close to my cart and pat the blankets.
The men like to have one wait with them. There is a thing many of them say. It is a dull thing, and touching, as sometimes dull things are. They will say, over and over, "If you were not here, I should be alone. If you were not here, I should be alone."
But when the doctors come, with the chloroform, it is only of his mother the man thinks. He says, "Oh, maman! Oh, maman!" and keeps all the time saying it till he sleeps.
The adjutant, the new Number 12, says that you can hear them calling maman all the time when they lie wounded between the trenches, wounded and one cannot get to them to pick them up. He says it is the last word they call before they are still.