Captivity and Escape

by Jean Martin

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Some days later I was sent to the general hospital to wait for a motor ambulance.

How lonely that hospital was! There, in spite of its thousand occupants, reigned the stillness of death! One felt that force, the brutal hand of the conqueror, had fallen upon the establishment which formerly had been ruled by the gentle laws of meek nuns. The sisters, hiding their bent heads and humiliated faces under frilled caps, were still half distracted from fear of the fighting and the entrance of the invaders. Their features were drawn and pinched with weariness, caused by overwork of a rough and hurried nature, by want of rest and the constant nursing they were obliged to do. Terrorised by the threats of the Teuton soldiery, they walked about dumb, with set lips and hearts oppressed, swallowing the tears which choked them, not daring to address a word to us, troubled and terrified as they were by the sight of the uniform of a fellow-countryman in those circumstances. They went about the wards noiselessly, aimlessly. Feeling themselves watched, they had the appearance of trapped animals, and mad with grief, thinking of their God whom they could no longer serve at the accustomed hours, of the God who seemed to have abandoned them, they threw looks of compassion on all these men, alike in misfortune, who, side by side, pell-mell, French and Germans, so that one could no longer distinguish which was which, were lying on straw mattresses on the ground, breathing similar groans, assailed by similar ills, similar sufferings. Kept in sight and watched all the time, the poor sisters were not free to administer the consolations of their religion to a man tortured by fever, or even to one dying. They passed by, it seemed with indifference, their bodies stiffened, their eyes fixed on the ground, a prey to despair and terror, not even seeing the misery which later, when calm had come back to their tortured souls, they would learn to soothe again.

Confused and bewildered, unemployed in the midst of an endless task, not knowing what to do, in that house where now they were strangers on whom suspicion rested, avoiding one another they went slowly from ward to ward, stunned, disgusted by the disorder; no longer recognising, in that place where confusion reigned, the dear hospital formerly so well kept. Useless, incapable of rendering the slightest service, they wandered about—bodies without souls, trembling, terrified at the sight of a German uniform.

They took no rest. Perhaps they had been turned out of their rooms, or dreaded to be alone with their misery, fearing that the familiar prayers which would come to their lips might rise without warmth, be bitter and profane, full of the incredulity of despair and blasphemous doubt.

Piled in the yard were knapsacks, nose-bags, equipment, arms, boots, tents, all the belongings of the wounded Germans. Here the sight of the blood and mud reminded one of the horror of combat and of crime. Heavy boots thudded on the polished floors where formerly women’s slippers had glided, lightly and silently. The peaceful little chapel, so full of the sweetness of the Virgin, as well as of memories of hours of ecstasy and prayer, had been profaned. The prie-Dieu were overthrown and pushed away into corners, giving place to mattresses for the Teuton soldiers, whose hoarse moans and cries profaned the sanctity of the place.

The enemy within those walls had driven God from His sanctuary. The sisters had themselves been hustled, threatened, frightened, their sacred calling barely sufficing to protect them. They could not escape in pious meditation from the agony of the battle, for the din of combat still shocked their ears, and great numbers of wounded had begun to flow in, displaying their hideous wounds, soiling the floor with blood and mud, staining the sheets, blankets, even the mattresses.

Nurses, doctors, officers, men even, succeeded each other, demanding and requiring to be taken in and tended immediately; and the poor sisters had lost their heads on account of the threats and the sight of this terrible work of death and destruction.

Sometimes, while rapidly crossing a ward from which the jailer was absent, one, with her great, sad, despairing eyes full of compassion, would look for a moment stealthily at one of her dear French soldiers and shake her head. Then, without saying a word, in her anguish of heart and soul, she would press her hands to her lips to repress a sob, and wipe the tears from her eyes.

But these sufferings were not deemed sufficient; the sisters had not yet come to the end of their long ordeal of torments. One fine morning they were enlisted in a German sanitary corps and placed under the orders of a “Superior,” a German who had just arrived. She took the reins of Government in hand with a strong grip, and from that time on the sisters were obliged to obey this stranger in matters spiritual as well as material. Their country and their God were taken from them; they were obliged to bend the knee before the God which the Germans brought with them in their savage invasion, and from whom they never part. Written in relief on the buckles of their belts was the arrogant device: “Gott mit uns.”