The vast wards were almost vacant at this hour, for many of the patients were out-of-doors.
"They recover rapidly, if you only knew! One can see the new flesh grow."
"And they return to the firing-line?" asked Odette.
"They must, indeed!"
A group of four convalescents was playing a game of cards on a bed. Others, stretched at length, were reading; several were sleeping, some were receiving friends. A photographer in a corner was taking pictures.
Beds and beds, and torn flesh, and perforated limbs, and members sawn off, and trepanned skulls! And the tetanus, the gangrene, the typhus, and that red torrent by which the soul of a man was taking flight, amid all that whiteness!
Odette felt as if she should die, and left the hospital. During all her visit one question had been upon her lips: "Shall I find here any one who knew my husband?" What was it that kept her from uttering it? She could not have told how it was, but she had not so much as pronounced her husband's name. A weight had seemed to be crushing her during the whole time. She had felt overwhelmed by the new horror. The worst was that when at last she reached home she felt ashamed to weep for her own sorrow.
The fact also that all that human flesh had been ravaged for the same cause; that of those unhappy ones who were groaning, not one thought of blaming the cause; and that other fact that one part of humanity, upright and able, was bending with help over the other, gasping part, forced her to gather up her disordered thoughts and in the midst of her confusion to exclaim:
"Something is changed!"
That evening, at six o'clock, instead of wandering about the streets in heavy sadness, she went, as Mme. de Calouas had begged her to do, to evening prayer at the Chapel of the Orphanage, in which the Red Cross was now installed. It was a convent chapel, reserved for nuns, the public being admitted only behind a sort of screen of carved wood, through which could be seen the orderly rows of Sisters and orphans, the altar and the lights. She found herself in the midst of valid soldiers; that is to say, such as by one means or another could move from place to place. There were bandaged heads, arms in slings, stiff or deformed legs, crutches. Odette was moved by the singing more than she could have believed. Suddenly sobs choked her, and she wept. The men turned toward this young woman in mourning whom they could hardly have helped noticing, and who kept on wiping her eyes. She was weeping from a natural need of weeping. She was weeping for Jean, but also she wept with great pity for all those lacerated bodies; and for the first time she realized that these men, or these fragments of men, had come from places where death and pain were of all things the most usual.