The doctors from the Lycée Prince Victor, now the big military hospital, are there by the chariot. They stand waiting and talking together. They turn up their coat collars and sink their hands in their pockets and stamp their feet in the cold of the dawn.
The orderlies wait with their stretchers, back against the wall, under the gay posters of places where people used to go to be amused.
The Red Cross nurses keep back in the cantine, where it is warmer.
The train is late. It has been from three to six hours late each one of these dreadful mornings.
Everything has been ready since long, long ago, in the deepest dark of the night.
If only there are enough blankets.
The train is terribly, terribly late.
New Ones
It was for this that they evacuated last week all who could possibly be moved, to fill the wards with other broken things. They gathered up all the broken things that had lain here so long, and sent them away. And now the wards are full of other broken things.
The old ones had grown accustomed to the rooms. They had suffered and been unhappy in these rooms, and when they had to go away they did not want to go. They had nothing left but the place and people of their suffering, and they found, when they had to go, that they loved the place and the people they had grown so used to. They seemed to be afraid to go away. To all the weariness was added this new weariness.