Railway Station, The Days of the 25th
The trains of wounded arrive almost always at dawn, the late autumn dawn.
The lamps of the station are still burning, but grow pale.
Beyond the open platform, across the tracks, you can see that dawn has come to the sky, behind the mountains.
There is a star in the midst of the dawn, Hesper, star of both the twilights, very big and bright and near, like a lamp.
It is very cold.
In the pale light of the dawn and the pale light of the station lamps they wait for the train of wounded to come in.
The Red Cross has a cantine at the station in what used to be the buffet. But these men will be past need of coffee and soup.
The cart of the buffet, that used to be pushed along the trains with breakfasts under the carriage windows, is heaped now, in these days, with very strange things. There is need of these things, always. There is this, and that, that cannot wait.
The doctors from the Lycée Prince Victor, now the big military hospital, are there by the chariot. They stand waiting and talking together. They turn up their coat collars and sink their hands in their pockets and stamp their feet in the cold of the dawn.
The orderlies wait with their stretchers, back against the wall, under the gay posters of places where people used to go to be amused.
The Red Cross nurses keep back in the cantine, where it is warmer.
The train is late. It has been from three to six hours late each one of these dreadful mornings.
Everything has been ready since long, long ago, in the deepest dark of the night.
If only there are enough blankets.
The train is terribly, terribly late.