Hospital, Monday, June 12th
We never see them well. As soon as they are better at all they send them downstairs to the convalescent ward, and from there they are marked for other hospitals, and in a day or two, one morning, I come to find them gone. The men who were evacuated at the beginning of Verdun did not even make the halt of the ward downstairs. And now those first Verdun men are gone, all but the very worst of them, to make place for men from, we don't know where.
The boy with the almond-shaped eyes is one of those who are left. He was much better for days, and now he has gone down again. He is tuberculous, and that is why he never will get well. He lies sunk down in the bed, a very small heap with closed eyes and one cheek always bright red. His father and mother have come up from the country, from somewhere in Normandy; they sit together beside his bed and look at him. His mother wears a dress of the richest black silk, that must have been the gala dress of her family for two or three generations, and a cap of lace that the smartest lady in Paris would be proud of. His father wears a black satin Sunday smock, of which the yoke is embroidered wonderfully. They have dressed themselves in their very best to come and sit by their boy, who scarcely notices them.
I like to think how happily the new Number 4—we call them all new since Verdun began—went off, with his one leg. He will have a wooden stick leg and be able to get about splendidly in his meadows of the High Loire. To-day he showed me a little photograph of his wife, in close-bound muslin cap and folded neckerchief. Her face is like the face of the Madonna in the simple calm pure paintings of the old masters. I said, "She is perfectly beautiful." He said, "Oh, no, madame, she is only a peasant, and not young. It is not even a good photograph. And it is all cracked and rubbed, madame sees, because I have worn it all the time of the war, sewn in my coat."
Little Charles is always left—poor little Charles, well used to the confusion of departures and arrivals.
As I was leaving to-day at noon, the mother and father of the boy with the almond-shaped eyes got up from beside his bed and stopped me. The father, who has almond-shaped eyes too, asked if they might have a word with me when no one could hear. Their gala finery made them the more pathetic, confused, and timid, strangers in such strange times and place.
We went out into the corridor, the three of us, and stood by the door of Madame Bayle's linen-room.
The father asked me, whispering, if I thought that the people of the hospital were fond of the boy? He said that he and the mother were obliged to go back that night to the farm, and did I think that these people they must leave their boy with were fond of him?