“I never tried to teach them how to handle any real crisis, only to recognize it when it came, and go quickly to fetch me. I taught them to watch carefully and at the first sign of blood on their patients’ clothing or on the mattress, to take the knapsack out from under the sick man’s head—they had no other pillow, of course—to lay him down flat, and then to run and call me, from wherever I was.”
“You must have had almost no sleep at all.”
“That was the greatest help I had, being able to get along on little sleep. And I got more work out of my helpers than any man could, for they were ashamed to ask to sleep or rest, seeing that a woman, half their size, could still keep going.”
“But how about your famous hygienic regularity, the morning exercises and cold baths and——”
“Oh, as soon as I saw I was in for a long period of regular service, I took the greatest care to go on with all the things which keep one fit for regular service.”
“Morning tubs?”
“Yes, morning tubs! I slept—what time I had to sleep—in an abandoned peasant’s house in an evacuated village near the hospital. I didn’t take any of the downstairs rooms because people are likely to walk right into an abandoned house, and part of the time there were soldiers quartered in the village. Then there was usually somebody in the house with me. The other times I had it all to myself. I took a room on the second floor. It happened to have a flight of steps leading up to it, and another one going out of it into the attic. Of course, I never had any heat, and the drafts from those two open stairways—well, it was like sleeping in the middle of a city square. Sometimes I used to take down a bottle filled with hot water, but the bed was so cold that it was almost instantly chilled. Many a time I have gone to sleep, all curled up in a ball, holding my feet in my hands, because they were so cold, and wakened to find them still as icy. Oh, the cold! That is the worst enemy of all at the front, the most wearing, the most demoralizing, the most dehumanizing, because it lasts so. With other things—hunger, wounds, danger—either it kills you, or it passes. But the cold is always there.”
She loses herself for a moment in brooding recollection and you wonder if Jeanne d’Arc ever did anything braver for her country than did this delicate, stout-hearted modern woman, sleeping alone for months and months in bitter cold in a deserted house in a deserted village.
She comes back to the present. “And it was there that I took my morning tubs!” she says with an amused smile. “Of course the water froze hard into a solid lump. So I put carbonate de potasse into it. This not only kept it from freezing, but made it alkaline, so that it was an excellent detergent and stimulant to the skin. I assure you, after a night in which I had been incessantly called from one bed to another, when I felt very much done-up, my cold sponge-bath in that water was like a resurrection. I was made over. Then, of course, no matter how busy I was, I took care of my feet—changed my stockings and shoes every day. Feet are one’s weakest point in a long pull like that.”
You venture to remark about a slight limp noticeable when she walks. “Yes, it comes from a frozen foot—I have to admit it. But it’s really not my fault. That was later, at the time of the battle at Verdun. There are always brief crises, when you have to give your all and not stop to think. I went nine days then without once taking off my shoes. I hadn’t my other pair by that time. The Boches had them, probably.”