SCENES "IN A FRENCH HOSPITAL"
Stories of a Nurse
By M. Eydoux-Demians—Translated by Betty Yeomans
This is a wonderful revelation of the soul of France. It gives "impressions of things actually seen and heard, revealing the wonderful courage and emotion that exists to-day in a French provincial hospital." These notes have been collected in a volume dedicated: "To My Five Brothers Wounded in the Service of France." These touching and inspiring stories of the wounded and nurses in a French hospital and told with a dramatic and literary power which make them little masterpieces. They form a most realistic picture of the human side of the Great War. The selections herein given are from the hundreds of thrilling anecdotes in the book, by courtesy of the publishers, Duffield and Company: Copyrighted 1915.
[7] I—STORIES OF THE WOUNDED ON THEIR BEDS
On October sixth, (1914) last, I received a message from the directress of the Hospital of Saint Dominic, reading as follows:
"A large number of wounded have just arrived. We can't take care of any more ourselves, and the moment has come to call for volunteers. I shall expect your help."
One hour later, as you can easily imagine, I was at Saint Dominic. This specially privileged hospital is under the gentle management of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul. Several years ago some of its devoted trustees made one effort after another on its behalf in Paris, and, after overcoming many difficulties, reëstablished the Sisters of Charity amongst us once again. They had not a doubt even then that they were working in the interests of France's soldiers, those same soldiers whose faces light up now with such a special joy when they lie on their painful stretchers, and catch sight, near the large entrance porch, of the good white cornettes of the Sisters waiting for them.
With my heart beating fast I entered the room to which I had been assigned. There they all were before me, these lads that had undergone that terrible and fierce adventuring into war. I remember how they went away in our wonderful mobilisation trains, those makeshift, flower-bedecked trains that sped all of them to the same destination, the same region of glory and bloodshed. One long war cry seemed to rise up from them over all our land. Our young soldiers who went away in them had acquired an entirely new way of shouting "Vive la France." It was no longer as if they were on parade, notwithstanding all the flowers that people tossed to them: it was already the cry of men who were to lead in war's assaults, and make the supreme sacrifice of their lives. I remember one little infantryman of twenty years, standing erect with folded arms in the back of his compartment, his eyes flashing, and all the muscles of his pale face taut. He kept repeating threateningly, "Vive la France—vive la France," without a look toward any one; saying it just to himself and for his country. And I felt that it was as if he said: "We shall get them: we must get them, no matter what it costs. As for me, well, you see, to begin with, my life doesn't count any more." This very fellow is the one, perhaps, who has come back now and sleeps here in this first cot, where a face both energetic and infantile shows in the midst of the blood-stained linen.
Sister Gabrielle made a tour with me of all the patients. The memory of certain of them particularly is fixed in my mind. There is number 3, here, who got a bullet wound in the region of the liver, and has to lie absolutely still, lest an internal hemorrhage may occur at any moment. A warrior of twenty-three he is, with cheeks as rosy as a girl's, and clear blue eyes. He fought like a lion, they say, but here nothing could be gentler. His appreciation for the least thing that is done for him is touching. Number 8, little eight, as they call him, a volunteer, who seems about fifteen, and who has to live week after week propped on his right side, on a hard hospital bed, on account of an abscess following his wound. Number 12, an infantryman, who got a bullet in the left temple; it was extracted from his right maxillary, and in passing cut his tongue in two. "Everything has been put back," said the Sister, "but he can't talk yet, and he'll have to learn to talk all over again, like a little child. In taking care of him you must come every once in a while and see if you can guess what he wants." Number 17, a brave among the braves, who, under the enemy's fire, crawled ten kilometres on his hands and knees, dragging his twice-wounded foot behind him, to deliver an order that he had been charged with. His wounds cause him cruel suffering, and yet he seems illuminated as with some strange inward joy. Number 24, nicknamed the little sieve, because of his fifteen wounds. Number 32, who suffers like a real martyr. His leg was literally shattered by the fragments of a shell. It was a question whether it could be saved at all, but following the directions of the war surgeon, we are keeping up the attempt. Antiseptic injections are made twice a day as deep as the bone. Number 30, who has lost an eye and has two open fractures in his right arm. When I said to him: "You have given a good deal for France," he answered, "It's the least I could do." And he added, laughing, "I was so clumsy with my hands. This will teach me to be clever even with my left one."...
One cannot repeat too often or too admiringly, "Our wounded." Our wounded, that is to say, those men who have come back from that hell, "whose horrors," they say themselves, "are indescribable;" those who have marched beneath "that terrible, moving curtain of iron," to which an officer compared the mass of balls and shells in battle, a mass so compact that it obscured the very daylight on the firing line. Our wounded! Those, in a word, who have brought back in their very flesh the frightful scars of the enemy's iron, those who have cemented with their own blood the human wall that is now our frontier. They have come back, not with their courage drained, broken down, horror-stricken, stunned—not at all. They forget themselves to talk smilingly of the great hope in which we all share. They are touched, deeply touched, by the few hours of fatigue we undergo for them each day—for them who have given almost their lives.
My tasks were laid out for me, and I began work at once, thanked by the soldiers almost in advance for my trouble.
"It's a bit too much to see you work like this for us."
"All the same, no one has ever been served like this."
They are not a bit difficult, but pleased with everything, these men who suffer so much, who have such a right to every care. Alas, there are too many of them (this hospital alone has as many as a thousand) to permit of all the little comforting things that we should like to do for them without stint. The Sister who cooks is sorely driven, and even the prescribed dishes that she sends up for the sickest ones are often far from appetizing. For instance, I have just taken Number 13, who is consumed by a lingering fever (a bullet passed through his lung), a milk soup that smelt badly burned, and in which pieces of half-cooked rice floated round. I sighed a little about it as I put the napkin on the bed. Did he understand what worried me? In any case, he shows no distaste, and a quarter of an hour later, when I pass by him, he motions to me, and says gently, "It was delicious, madame."
That's the way they all are—all of them.
II—STORY OF SISTER GABRIELLE—"ARCHANGEL"
I study with emotion the admirable vision of the human soul which the Sister of Charity and the wounded soldier set before me. It is a vision which has intervened always, as with an element of the supernatural, in our war-time pictures, and, behold, now we find it again, almost miraculously, in the supreme struggle of 1914.
Sister Gabrielle, who has charge of my room, her identity quite hidden as it is by her archangel's name, is the daughter of a general, as I know. She has three brothers that have served beneath the colours. The oldest, a quite young captain, has just met his death on the field of honour. I happen to have learned the circumstances: how, covered with blood already flowing from three different wounds, Captain X nevertheless struggled on bravely at the head of his men, and after several hours of conflict was struck by a bullet full in the breast. He fell, crying: "Don't fall back! That's my last order!"
Sister Gabrielle was told only last week of the glorious grief that had been thrust upon her, but no one around her would have guessed her sorrow. Possibly her smile for the patients that day was a little more compassionate and tender than usual, when she thought of her brother enduring his moment of supreme agony alone down there in the forests of the Vosges....
She is thin and frail—mortally ill herself, they say; she was quite ill one month ago. But if you speak to her of her health she interrupts you a little impatiently:
"We have given ourselves, body and soul, according to our vows. To last a little longer or a little less doesn't matter. The main thing is to fulfill our tasks. Besides," she adds, indicating her patients, "they have given their lives for France. It is quite right, if it must be so, that our lives be sacrificed to save them."...
In the lot of wounded that were sent in yesterday, forty came to Sister Gabrielle directly from the Aisne. They arrived toward the close of the day, and I shall never forget the spectacle of that room. One stretcher succeeded another, all borne slowly by the litter-men and set down near the hastily prepared beds. Here and there you caught a cry of pain that could not be kept in, though there were no complaints, no continued groanings. Yet now, when you lean over those glorious and lamentable blue bonnets, cut as they are by bullets and stained with the mud of the trenches, when you take off the caps that have grown stiff with the dampness of the long rains, you perceive their suffering by the glittering look in their fevered eyes, their poor, worn faces and ravaged features, sunken and hollow with suffering. Then, all at once, at the least word, the old gallantry that we know so well reasserts itself. For example, they ask the most touching and childish favours of us. Thus if a limb that hurts too much must be lifted, or a piece of clothing that binds a wound eased up, they all ask:
"Not the orderly, not the orderly, please! the Sister or the lady."
The first words that the newcomers exchange with their cot neighbours are not about their own hardships; they speak first, and before anything else, of France.
"How are things going down there?"
"All right. We'll get them."
Then the newcomers, worn out as they are, sink into feverish sleep, struggling sometimes for days between realities and the persistent nightmare of the visions that pursue them. That night in the room that was always so still, but that now seemed more feverish than usual, I heard a sound of smothered sobs. It was Number 25, a big, good-looking soldier, whom each day I had seen having his wound dressed, a real torture, without a word, and who was sobbing now with his head in his pillow, ashamed of his tears, but powerless to keep them back. I went to him and tried to question him, but the soldiers don't readily speak to you of the sorrows that touch their hearts the deepest and most nearly.
"Thank you, lady; don't bother yourself about me. I don't need anything."
"Is your pain worse, maybe?"
"I'm in pain, yes, terribly, but it isn't that."
"What is it, then? Won't you tell me?"
He denied me still, then, all at once, under the pressure of his grief, he said:
"Oh, yes, I do feel like confiding in you. I'll tell you what it is. The comrade who was waiting next to me till his bed was ready brought me news of the death of my best friend. He was in his regiment and was killed by his side. Oh, madame, he was such a fine fellow, so devoted and full of courage. We were brought up together. He was more than my chum; he was my friend."
He cried and cried. He had borne everything without giving way—the continual nearness of death, the so hard life in the trenches, the incessant physical suffering; but the death of his friend crushed him and brought him down to earth. And while I murmured words that, alas, were futile for any change they made in his sorrow, but which did some good, just the same, I heard him sobbing in his pillow:
"My friend was killed. My friend was killed."
His friend—when one knows what the word comrade means to them, one divines all that word friend may mean, too.
Sister Gabrielle, whose infallible instinct brings her always to the cots where the sickest of her children are, passed near Number 25 and stopped a moment. She did not ask him anything. She just put her hand caressingly on his brown head, so young and virile, and said in her firm, sweet voice:
"All right, my boy, all right. Courage. Remember all this is for France."
Then turning to me, she said:
"Before night-time wouldn't you like to play a game of dominoes with this good boy? He'll represent the French forces, and in the morning he must be able to tell me that he has won."
In the midst of his tears the young soldier, his heart swelling in his distress, smiled at finding himself thus treated like a child. They have such need of it, the soldiers, after having done so valiantly the work of men!
III—STORIES OF THE SOLDIERS FROM THE AISNE
It is comforting to hear them talk about their superior officers, as a soldier of the 149th Infantry has just talked to me about his captain.
"Oh, I can tell you, my captain had plenty of good blood in his veins. There was nothing suspicious about him. I saw him standing straight up among the whistling bullets, giving his orders without flinching, without recoiling one inch, as if he were sitting at his desk and only flies were buzzing round his head. And so gentle, too. Good to the men and always jolly. We were in luck to have him over us."
I asked him questions about his campaign, and he talked freely, having only good things to tell. The taciturn ones are those who have sad memories to conceal.
"We were the ones told off to take the village of S——," he said, "where the enemy was. My captain, who acted as chief of battalion, got us all together, and said to us:
"'There seem to be two or three Boches down there. We must get them out, eh?'
"Everybody knew very well what that meant, but we laughed and went to it in good part. What fights those were! Two days of bloody battles in the streets. Finally the village was ours. We had one night's rest in a farmhouse, three-quarters of which had been destroyed. When we got there we spied an unfortunate porker in a corner. He had taken refuge there, frightened by the firing. He came in very handy, I can tell you, for our stomachs were hollow.
"'Charge again on that Boche, there,' said the Captain. When he had eaten and slept and assembled again next day, he said:
"Well, well, my lads, we're in danger of getting too soft here. Suppose we go on a little further and see what's happening.'
"We marched on further, but the enemy, who were in force, began to shoot at us all at once from below. My Captain didn't expose us needlessly. He made us lie down in the deserted trenches. There were corpses there and dead horses, and water, water everywhere. It rained without stopping. We spent the night up to our waists in water. It was enough to make one laugh."
To laugh—this word turns up all the time in their recitals, and in the most unexpected manner. Oh, this French courage, which faces not only the bitter struggle with danger, but disdains and mocks it, too; that elegant courage of our fathers that has been born again amongst us.
My foot-soldier, Number 149, was seized with quite a touching emotion when I told him that I knew his Captain's lady.
"Tell her she may be proud," he said, "and that I'd willingly go back down there; for my country's sake, of course, but also and a good deal, on my Captain's account."
Then I let him know something that I'd kept till the end of our interview, that his Captain, young as he was, had just been promoted to the rank of battalion chief; that the Cross of the Legion of Honour had been given him, and that, thanks to him, no doubt, the entire regiment had been mentioned in the order of the day. I won't attempt to picture the little soldier's moving and disinterested joy.
Near Number 3's bed I caught sight of a peasant woman from the Cher, in a white head-dress, and an old man, who wore a medallion of 1870 on his breast.
"They are his parents," Sister Gabrielle explained to me. "I had word sent to them. The poor lad is in grave danger. Luckily I've got the management's permission to let the mother pass the nights here."
In this way I became acquainted with the Mèchins, French peasants of the old order, unalterably attached to the soil. They hope, nay, they are sure, that their son is going to get well. The sick man says nothing. They're all like that, our soldiers—no foolish tenderness, no pain given to their parents. Who knows, besides, how much their desire to live may have dwindled down after their tragic voyages to the frontier? The soul must possess new powers of detachment when it has risen to the heights of absolute self-sacrifice. The little soldier does not deceive himself, Sister Gabrielle has told me, and when I expressed my admiration for the strange moral force that he gave proof of, she answered me proudly:
"But they are all like that."
Just as I was going to leave the room the sick man summoned me with his eyes. I went up to him and bent over him.
"Do you want anything?" I asked.
He made a sign of No, and with a great effort raised his hand outside the bed and reached it toward me, murmuring: "Thanks."
I understood. It was his good-bye. He thought that he should perhaps not be there in the morning when I came back.
IV—STORIES OF THE HOSPITAL ORDERLIES
The corps of orderlies is not always sympathetic. I must say, however, that in the room where I am employed, each one does his duty, thanks, no doubt, to the active supervision of the Sister, thanks also perhaps to three singularly moving personalities among the orderlies themselves.
To begin with, there is Nicolas Indjematoured, twenty-two, a Greek, and a subject of the Ottoman empire. He held a highly lucrative position, of which he was very proud, in a bank at Constantinople, but when the war broke out, he could not bear the thought of being drawn into service with the Germans against France, and did not hesitate to give up his job. He would not even see his old mother again, but made a will providing for her with all his small store of property, and sailed away as a stowaway on a steamer which landed him at Marseilles. He enlisted as a volunteer in the Legion and was ordered here, where, however, soon after his arrival, he received a serious finger wound, and was sent to St. Dominic to be cured. He explained his state of mind to me with simplicity and emotion:
"You can understand, madame, how ashamed I am, among all these brave men, not to have done anything yet for France. Luckily I can help Sister in serving them. It's a great honour for me."
In the hospital room they all call him "the little Greek." Night and day he holds himself in readiness to do things for the invalids, whom he treats with touching consideration, refusing doggedly to accept the least remuneration from the management.
Boisset, a stubbly little orderly of some sixty years, is an old employee of the hospital. An ex-pastry cook with no family, he was operated on and cared for at the hospital ten years ago. His case is one of those mysterious stories of conversion that work themselves out in secret near this cross-shaped chapel, with its four great doors wide open on the wards of suffering.
Boisset, once cured, begged permission not to leave the hospital, "hoping," as he said, "to consecrate my life to God in the service of the poor wounded."
Do not his words recall those of the brothers of St. Francis? Like them, Boisset has summed up his whole life in these two words: simplicity and heroism. He is at others' service night and day, just as he desired to be. The Sister calls him "her right arm," something at which he only half shows his pride. He is the one that's called upon, with never any fear of putting him out, if there's anything to be done in the way of lifting some fellow on whom a specially delicate operation has been performed, or doing some other difficult bit of duty. "Boisset, Boisset!" You get accustomed to hearing his name called out each moment. And Boisset, untiring, runs from one bed to the other, with his mincing, weary step, incessantly. In his moments of leisure he harks back to his old trade, begging from the kitchen some left-over bits of milk and whites of eggs, with which he cooks up some sweet dishes for his beloved patients, by whom they are much appreciated. What strikes me especially in Boisset is his joyful spirit. This man, who deliberately leads the hardest kind of life, has a smile always on his lips, and cheerfulness always in his heart. In the little recess where he does the patients' dishes you can hear him humming the canticles, especially the magnificat, of which he is very fond, as he confided to me, because it's the song of joy. When I find myself with Boisset I always want to talk to him about "Dame Poverty" and "Charity, her hand-maiden."
Our third orderly, the Marquess of X, belongs to one of the greatest Italian families. His mother was a French woman, and from the very beginning of hostilities, "he felt," as he put it, "the French blood boiling in his veins."
He found a simple and admirable way of doing something for his mother's country accordingly, by coming and putting himself at the service of the wounded. He wanted "to perform the humblest duties," he particularly specified. He did each day, from morning till night, very humble and sometimes repulsive duties, without apparently recoiling from them. He is but one in the nameless crowd of orderlies, yet the patients very easily distinguish him from the others, and the consolation and care that he gives them are specially sweet to them, because it includes the admiration of a noble soul and of a whole race for the French soldier.
The day he arrived, the Marquess of X, after making a tour of the wounded, came up to me with tears in his eyes.
"What extraordinary reserves of energy and heroism the French still have," he remarked to me, much moved. "To hear these young fellows tell of the dangers they've gone through, talking about sufferings, not only without complaining of them, but laughing about them, is 'the finest part of it all.'"
V—STORIES FROM THE COTS OF THE DYING
Sister Gabrielle accosted me this morning with a luminous smile:
"We shall certainly save Number 32's leg. The work of disinfection is finished. The flesh begins to form again over the wound."
She is radiant. Such are her joys, the only ones she asks of life. Nothing else exists, or ever will exist for her, and yet her face is still young. Let us incline our heads before such lives as hers! In a flash I understand whence comes the deep-seated affinity of soul that rules between Sister Gabrielle and our soldiers; she has given as they have given, everything, even themselves. Only in her case, it is for always and under all circumstances. I ask her what she thinks of Number 3, who seems to me to be picking up a bit. She shakes her head sadly.
"His parents are full of illusions about him, but we can only prolong things for him, with all our care."
Sad, oh, how sad! A little later Mother Mèchin comes and talks to me in a low voice about her son.
"Such a good boy, madame! He never gave us one hour of trouble. He fought so well, they say, and at home he was as gentle as a girl. And he didn't drink or waste his money. Just imagine, he has saved up a thousand francs, in little pieces, since he was a child. We didn't want him to cut into this money to go to the wars. We preferred to go without things ourselves to fit him out, and let him keep his little savings. He will be very glad of it when he gets married." Married! Alas, poor boy! A terrible spouse is waiting for him, one who will not give him up. But already he has marched before her with as much courage as now perhaps he guesses at her coming near. He is very feeble, but he makes a sign that he would like to speak to me. I bend over his bed, and he whispers in my ear:
"I took communion this morning: I am very glad."
I had just brought him a medal of the Holy Virgin. He smiled with pleasure, and I am moved to the bottom of my soul, seeing him kiss the medal and then place it on his heart.
All this time we are making the acquaintance of newer patients, as they are always coming into this ward, which is reserved for those that have undergone the most serious operations. "One never has the consolation of seeing them completely cured," Sister Gabrielle warned me with a sigh. I stop a moment before a little Turco, who took part in the battle of the Aisne. Both his legs are broken. His face stiffens with pain, and now and then a groan escapes him, though it is at once suppressed. He scolds himself about it, and warns himself, or calls me to witness, I am not sure which, when I hear him murmuring:
"Just look! When you think of the ones who stayed down there, ought you ever to groan? We are happier here. It isn't right."
Those who stayed down there! The imagination recoils before the picture evoked by those simple words; those who stay behind down there in the cold and the night, under constant menace by the barbarian enemy, who stay to suffer agonies alone, to die; to see their blood, without the help even of a single bandage, flow from their broken flesh and fall to the last drop upon the soil of France. I remember the words of another wounded soldier:
"After the battle, that day, you couldn't hear yourselves talk any more in the trenches for the cries of the wounded. It was like one great uninterrupted wail. You could make out appeals, prayers, calls for help, women's names. Then, little by little, silence came again, as a good many of them died. What we heard sound longest on the battlefield, from one end to the other, was the word 'Mother!' It is always those who are dying who call like that; we know that well now."
Alas! What do we not know now of the many-sided anguish and horror of death! We must certainly begin, like the little Turco, to qualify as lucky the fellows whom destiny delivers up to the hospital. And yet how they suffer, even these. To physical torture is added too often the worst tortures of the spirit.
"In the two months I've been away, not one bit of news of my family has reached me," a soldier told me, "except a despatch announcing my father's death."
Another had lost a fifteen-year-old son, whom he adored, two hours before his departure.
"His body was still warm: my wife was as if mad with sorrow."
They tell you these things without complaint. France called them: it was quite natural to answer her, to go to her out of the midst of the greatest sorrows, the deepest affections, the keenest happiness; sometimes, like that young engineer there of twenty, married eleven months ago to a girl of eighteen, to tear yourself away from a whole romance! He had been rejected for defective vision, but, and his wife agreed, he decided this did not matter any more, now that mobilization was under way, and that he must go. Two days after the birth of a fine boy—a future soldier, the mother said—he left his life of ease and tenderness and reported at the barracks as a simple soldier; and he had been encouraged to do so by that little Parisienne whom we should have thought absorbed in nothing but society and dress.
VI—STORY OF THE DEATH OF A MARTYR
The little soldier Mèchin had a serious hemorrhage in the night; he was in the operating room when I arrived at the hospital this morning. The Sister had sent his parents to pray in the chapel, they explained to me. The work of attending to the sick went on as usual; nothing must be allowed to stop the movement of the wheels. Toward ten o'clock I saw the litter coming back, borne slowly and with infinite precautions. Sister Gabrielle walked quite near it, and never stopped repeating: "Gently, more gently still."
The little soldier's face was as pale as a corpse; his eyes, which seemed to have sunk back in their orbits, were closed. When he was lifted up to put him on the bed, the shock, light as it was, brought on the supreme crisis. His breath, slow and scarcely perceptible, quickened strangely. His candid blue eyes opened, dilated, immense, as if looking for some one.
"He wants his parents," the Sister said to me in a low voice. "Go and find them quickly. It's the end."
In the quiet chapel that opened from the big wards, the poor Mèchins wept and prayed. I called them. The mother clasped her hands together, turning to me:
"The operation was successful, wasn't it, madame?"
Alas! I don't know, I fear not; but they must come quickly. Their tears blind them, she can't see her steps; she stumbles, and I have to give her my arm for support.
The moment she approaches her son she recognizes the shadow of death on his dear face, and would have given a cry of sorrow, but that Sister Gabrielle stops her, putting a finger on her lips. Soldiers who die must be surrounded by so great a peace.
"Here is your mother, here quite near to you," says the calm voice of the Sister in the ear of the dying man. "She embraces you. Your father is here, too. And here is the crucified One, Our Lord, here on your lips."
The little soldier kisses the cross and smiles at his mother; then his eyes, wide open, and as if drawn by some invincible attraction, turn and fix themselves on the open window opposite the bed, through which can be seen the infinite depths of the sky. Nothing again, till his last breath was drawn, could make his gaze turn elsewhere. Where have I already beheld a scene like this? I remember—it was in Greece, at Athens, last year. In the room of the tombs, a simple and admirable funeral monument represents death. A fine young man of twenty is standing ready to depart. His parents, their faces torn with sorrow, stretch out their arms to him, calling him, but he, so calm in the purity of the white marble, his eyes as if fascinated, looks fixedly, with all his thought, into the distance, one knows not where. As we passed this masterpiece, the young Greek who was with me whispered to me:
"Look at that boy there. He sees something else."
Our little soldier, too, seemed to see something else. The chaplain gave him the last blessings. The mysterious shore drew nearer moment by moment. A deep silence, solemnly calm and very moving, fell suddenly on the great room into which the terrible visitor was so soon to penetrate; truly he must die well, surrounded thus by his comrades, upheld until the end by a Sister of Charity. The wings of her white cornette tremble above the young face in its last agony. The Sister's voice, already a supernatural one, is the last of this world's voices that Private Mèchin is to hear. She says, and he repeats slowly, the supreme invocation: "O God, receive me into Thy Paradise. Jesus, have mercy on me. Holy Mother of God, pray for us in the hour of our death."
It is over ... the last breath exhales gently. The young soldier's gaze is fixed forever on the great light of God. Sister Gabrielle gently closes his eyelids and places the crucifix on the boy's heart. All is so calm, so evangelical, that the parents themselves dare not weep. Ah, how truly he spoke, the chaplain who wrote from the front: "The soldiers of France die without pain, like angels."
When the parents were led away for a while Sister Gabrielle piously replaced the sheet on the dead face, and said to me:
"This is the time for the patients' dinners. If you will, we'll go and serve them, and then we'll come back and lay out the body of this poor lad here."
I look at her wonderingly; she is very pale, and her eyes are full of unshed tears. She busies herself with the necessities of them all, with her usual clear-headedness. Have they already broken with everything of earth, these Sisters, lifted themselves for good above the most pardonable frailty?
(Thus the author, M. Eydoux-Demians, continues to relate her experiences in the hospitals, telling of "The Funeral," "The First Communion," "Our Priests," "The Little Refugee," and a half hundred other little tragedies that bring tears to the eyes, a pain to the heart, and a sense of overwhelming joy that manhood and womanhood can rise to such noble heights in these days of terrible suffering.—Editor.)