She decided not to leave the house, that she might see nothing, hear nothing, learn nothing. For a while she even thought of notifying the post-office not to forward her correspondence; but she was always hoping that the Minister would send her a permit to visit Jean's grave. Jealously she shut herself up with the memory of her husband.
Everything irritated her; everything was odious to her; everything seemed to conspire to raise between her and the beloved memory a barrier of bleeding corpses, a screen upon which were portrayed horrors invented by a satanic imagination, together with sentences of exalted morality unknown to her and whose new radiance blinded her.
Stamping her foot, tearing the handkerchief with which she was stanching her tears, she declared to herself that she would henceforth live only for Jean and by him. She kissed the photographs that she had brought with her. She stretched herself upon a lounge, engulfing herself in the torturing memory of him. For one day, several days, a week, perhaps longer, she would be able to live upon only the thought of him. She would open neither letters nor despatches that might come; if she was late with her condolences, her congratulations, what did it matter?
The idea of military glory entered her mind and suggested to her the hope of erecting a monument to her husband. She was caressing the thought when her maid entered her room like a gust of wind.
"Madame, the wounded! the wounded! Swarms of them! In automobiles, on trucks; it appears that there are twice as many for Sousville, and the train has carried as many more to Houlgate and Cabourg!"
Amelia threw open the windows. The train of wounded men was passing the house. Odette dared not forbid herself to look at it.
Autos were rumbling by, some of them covered, others displaying to the light of day a heap of men, motionless, bandaged, covered with clay, an agglutinated mass of flesh in which all individuality if not all life seemed to be held in suspense, a cart-load of humanity: not a single man but a mass of bloody pulp in which the suffering that it covered must be a common suffering. Then came a truck, two trucks, three. They were great drays across which were placed stretchers, and on these stretchers were extended what they call the bedded wounded, those whose legs are broken, or already amputated, or dreadfully crushed, those fever-stricken from projectiles received in the body, those with cloven skulls, hastily bound together. They were marine gunners, foot-soldiers, blacks; tall, handsome, Moroccans with brown skins. Distinguished from all the others by excess of ill fortune, they were stretched out, straight and rigid like corpses placed in order, at equal distances, upon the marble slabs of a morgue. The trucks going at a walk and carrying the most seriously wounded, at each check, each halt, each starting again, one could hear hollow moans; sometimes the outcry of a Moroccan, sharp like the voice of a child or a woman, would make you catch your breath, and the country folk, crowded along the sidewalks, would whimper as if they themselves were being tortured.
Amelia, who in the beginning had been chattering without ceasing, was now suffocated with sobs, and her elbows upon the window-ledge was weeping silently over this procession. Odette, hidden at another window, wept like her servant, incapable either of tearing herself away from the sight or of controlling her emotion.
At length, having closed the windows, the two women found themselves face to face with wet eyes. Amelia said:
"It is better to be dead than alive."