"Once after that we had a passing glimpse of English soldiers, a group of wretchedly ill men, with their wounds uncared for, stumbling along to the station. They were not taken to the hospital to be cared for; 'they' are always much harder on the English prisoners than on any others. Those were the days early in the war, when there were still things to buy in the shops, when we still had money to spend. How we all rushed to buy good chocolate, cigarettes! How desperately we tried to throw them to the prisoners! But there was no relaxation, that time, of the guard. Not once did we succeed. There was a double line of guards that day, and they held us far, far at a distance with their rifle butts. It was horrible—the silence of the crowd, rigorously observing the rule against demonstrations of any sort; not a sound except the thud of rifle butts on human flesh. Old M. B—— had his arm broken that day.
"With my hands full of cigarettes and chocolate, I followed them all the way to the station, my heart burning with pity for the poor men who looked at us with such sick, tired, despairing, hungry eyes. We threw them what we dared. Nothing reached them—nothing. At the station they waited, fainting with fatigue, with loss of blood, with hunger, with thirst, ringed around with soldiers, bayonets fixed. There we stood, we women and children and old men, our hands full of food and comforts—no, you never know how sickeningly your heart can throb and still go on beating. I had never thought I could hate as I did in that hour, a helpless spectator of that unnecessary cruelty. Since then I have had many lessons in how deeply even a modern woman can be forced to hate.
"The train came, the wounded men were driven aboard their cattle car. The train disappeared. They were gone. I walked home smiling—we never let 'them' see how 'their' tortures make us suffer. Later Julien, my little Julien—he was twelve then—found me still weeping furiously. He bent over me, his little body all tense and fierce. 'Don't cry so, auntie! Don't cry so! It won't last. It will soon be over.'
"That was two years ago.
"None of us Frenchwomen were allowed to stay long in hospital work. For one reason or another, we were all forbidden to go on caring for the wounded. I had the honor of being the very first to be put out of the door.
"One of the officers in charge said to me one day, some four or five months after the beginning, 'Ah, madame, we shall soon be good friends now.'
"The idea made me fall a step backward. 'What, monsieur? What do you mean?'
"'Yes, France and Germany will soon be friends. I know with absolute certainty that Germany has offered a third of Belgium to France and that France is more than satisfied to accept and end the war.'
"That is always one of the horrors up there. 'They' can tell you any news they please as 'absolute certainties.' Since we know nothing of what is going on except what they choose to tell us, we have no proofs to fling back at them; no proofs but moral ones, and 'they' find moral proofs ridiculous, of course.