“Please, is there a place where I may sleep a few hours?” she said.
But there was no place, not one. The great hospital was crowded to the last inch of its space with wounded—halls, passageways, aisles, even the stairs had wounded on them. Finally some one gave her a blanket and she lay down on the floor in the little office of the head-doctor and slept till morning—five or six hours. Then she went out into the town to try to find a lodging. Not one to be had, the town being as full as the hospital. She had not taken her clothes off, naturally, nor her shoes.
“Oh, then I did feel tired,” she says. “That morning, for the first time, I knew how tired I was, as I went dragging myself from door to door, begging for a room and a bed. It was because I was no longer working, you see. As long as you have work to do, you can go on.”
At last a poor woman took pity on her, said that she and her daughter would sleep together on one narrow bed, and let her have the other one.
“I was so glad, so glad,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, “to know I was to have a real bed! I was like a child. When you are as tired as that, you don’t think of anything but the simple elementals—lying down, being warm, having something to eat—all your fine, civilized ideas are swept away.”
She went back toward the hospital to get what few things she had been able to bring with her, and there she saw her chauffeur waving a paper toward her. “We are to be off at once,” he said, and showed her an order to leave Bar-le-Duc without delay, taking two nurses with them, and to go with all speed to the hospital at Vadelaincourt. They were crowded with wounded there.
“Then, at once, my tiredness went away,” she says. “It only lasted while I thought of getting a bed. When I knew we were going into action once more, I was myself again.”
By two o’clock that afternoon—this was Monday—they were en route for the hospital, the doctor on the seat by the chauffeur, the two nurses, hysterical with fear over the shells, weeping inside.
“What a terrible, tragic, inspiring trip that was!” she exclaims, and almost for the only time during her quietly told narration her voice quivers, her eyes suffuse. “We were going against the tide of fresh reserves, rushing out to the front—mile after mile, facing those strongly marching ranks of splendid young Frenchmen, all going out to suffer the unimaginable horrors from which I had just come. I could not bear to look into those eager, ardent faces. I was so proud of them, so yearning over them! And they were so full of spirit, hurrying forward to the supreme sacrifice. They shouted out to us again and again, ‘The battle isn’t over yet, is it? Will we get there in time?’ They laughed light-heartedly, the younger ones, when they saw me and called out, ‘Oh, the women are fighting out there, too, are they?’ Wave after wave of them, rank on rank, the best of my country, marching out to death.”
They were delayed by an accident to a tire, being instantly—as is the rule on military roads, always crammed to the last inch—lifted bodily into a neighboring field for repairs. No stationing for repairs is allowed on a road where every one is incessantly in movement. While the repairs were being made, the car sank deeper and deeper into the mud, and it was a Herculean undertaking to get it back in the main thoroughfare. As usual, a crowd of good-natured poilus managed this, heaving together with the hearty good-will to which all drivers of American ambulances can testify.