She was at that point in her reflections when Amelia entered, in tears:
"The son of the concierge, madame!"
"Well, what?"
"He too, madame!"
Then the details; the unlucky fellow had been buried alive in an upheaval caused by a bomb, and had been dug out only too late. And Amelia began to talk of her husband, as if it had been he who was buried alive.
When a few days passed without tidings of more deaths, all the women grew calm and began to hope. When a man whom they knew was killed, each one saw in him her husband, her father, her cousin, her son; all the men were wept for in advance in the person of the one who had fallen. If any one had said to these women: "But there are thousands falling every day, thousands!" they would have opened their eyes wide, only partly terrorized, for they had not yet become accustomed to the new condition of things. The one who should maintain that the war would not be over in a few weeks would be considered a bad patriot, or an ill-timed jester.
The next morning a new catastrophe; Pierre de Prans, otherwise Pierrot, he who had brought the news of Jean's death, had been brought to Val-de-Grâce hospital in a very alarming condition. His orderly, a fine fellow, who was wounded at the same time, was as good as dead. Pierrot had a bullet in the breast, one lung laid bare, and a broken arm. His orderly had stanched his wounds under a violent bombardment, filling up the enormous cavity with bandages snatched from the dead who surrounded them, then both had remained for six hours, their heads in a vile-smelling hole under a paving-stone, their bodies hidden by bushes. In the course of the night, hearing the French language spoken, they had kicked with their feet and the stretcher-bearers had drawn them out, both still living.
The narrative of these particulars produced a worse effect upon Odette than tidings of death; the more as some one had the lightness to say in her presence: "Much better to be shot dead at an unexpected moment than to endure such long and cruel agony."
"That is a fine idea!" retorted Odette. "Much better to be alive than dead."
Notwithstanding the sadness of these visits of friends when there was always some new death to weep for, deaths which had occurred under the most frightful circumstances, Odette felt that no other sorrow was equal to her sorrow; and she detested them all, not as losses hateful to endure, not as making part of a national calamity the like of which had never been before, but as unwelcome events intruding themselves between her and her own grief. She desired to be alone with her sorrow, and she resolved henceforth to know nothing of all the rest.