President Poincaré went in person to give her the Legion of Honour, the first given to a woman in this war; so rarely given to a woman, and here bestowed with the love of a nation. Sister Marie was in the kitchen at the time, very busy cooking the meal for the sick whom the sisters are still caring for. So Sister Julie took the President of France into the kitchen to meet Sister Marie, quite as she would take you or me. A human being is simply a human being to Sister Julie, to be treated courteously; and great men may not cause a meal for the sick to burn. After the complexity of French politics, President Poincaré was anything but unfavourably impressed by the incident.
“He was such a little man, I could not believe at first that he could be President,” she said. “I thought that the president of France would be a big man. But he was very agreeable and, I am sure, very wise. Then there were other men with him, a Monsieur de-de-Deschanel, who was president of something or other in Paris, and Monsieur du-du—yes, that was it, Du Bag. He also is president of something in Paris. They were very agreeable, too.”
“And your Legion of Honour?”
“Oh, my medal that M. le Président gave me! I keep that in a drawer. I do not wear it every day when I am in my working clothes.”
“Have you ever been to Paris?”
“No, monsieur.”
“They will make a great ado over you when you go.”
“I must stay in Gerbeviller. If I stayed during the fighting and when the Germans were here, why should I leave now? Gerbeviller is my home. There is much to do here, and there will be more to do when the people who were driven away return.”
These nuns saw their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot; they saw their townspeople killed by shells. The cornucopia of war’s horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town, who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have the stoicism to witness.
What feature of the nightmare had held most vividly in Sister Julie’s mind? It is hard to say; but the one which she dwelt on was about the boy and the cow. The invaders, when they came in, ordered that no inhabitant leave his house, on pain of death. A boy of ten took his cow to pasture in the morning as usual. He did not see anything wrong in that. The cow ought to go to pasture. And he was shot, for he broke a military regulation. He might have been a spy using the cow as a blind. War does not bother to discriminate. It kills.