The hospital is her world and she is thankful for every minute she can get away from it.
I leave my world to come to it.
I was ashamed to say to her, "It is for my own comfort I want to stay, to make myself imagine that I really am needed."
Hospital
Things They Say
Perhaps in other, different kinds of hospitals, hospitals of the little good sisters, or of ladies of the Red Cross, hospitals of beautiful influences, one could not love the men so much. In hospitals where the beautiful things of the Faith, prayers and tenderness and peace, are all around about the pain and death; and there are words for praise of courage and sacrifice, and words for sympathy and for hope, and words for high ideals; where it is as poets and painters and all people have always imagined it, perhaps one could not get quite this understanding of things that are not said, or come in so rough and vivid a way, upon unimagined things.
One loves to think of the wounded soldier with the nun beside him, and of the lady of the great world tending the peasant hero. One loves to hear of the men saying, "C'est pour la France."
Here there are no pictures I would dare call beautiful. It is crude and raw. And things are not said. When there is not too much suffering, it is rough. And when the suffering is great, it is all very dumb.
Here there is no one who knows how to word things. The men do not know, and the nurses do not know how to tell them. They all only just go on.
The nurses are poor women, of the people. They come, each one of them, from her own small desperate struggle for life, each from her own crushing deadening small miseries and cares, without any help of dream and vision, callously—one, just looking on, might think—to their work in the hospital. To the great magnificent suffering, each one of them comes dulled and hardened by some small sordid helpless suffering of her own. Everything has always been a struggle, and this is just part of it. They work on every day, and all day long, with no one to put into words for them, devotion and sacrifice. No one here speaks of those things, or thinks of them, or even knows.
When I see my little Madame Marthe, my chief, so very tired, I say to her, "You work so hard." And she always says, shrugging her thin round shoulders, "Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, i' faut b'en. Nous sommes là pour ça." If I dared to tell the patronne, who is intelligent to bitterness, that I admired this she did or that, she would say, "What of it, we are paid for that."