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.'"