Mme. de Calouas came to say that the stretcher-bearers were coming to carry "the thigh" to be dressed. Odette followed "the thigh." The new nurse was asked to cut the dressing. She broke into a cold perspiration; she thought the scissors were defective, and her remark provoked a smile from all the experts around; only the patient looked at her with an apprehension which seemed to paralyze her.
"You must learn to cut dressings," said Mme. de Calouas. "You will get used to it; just a knack."
Finally the steel succeeded in biting through the damp compresses. When they fell apart the wound appeared. It was an open fracture of the leg, whence exhaled the special sickening smell of osseous pus. The large wound spread open like a nightmare flower with thick petals, soft and viscid, covered with a creamy layer of dull old-rose color. They washed it; the patient gritted his teeth; now and again a cry escaped from the thin little brown face. When they looked at him he was brave enough to smile and say, "That's all right."
Odette was more ill than the wounded man. As on the previous evening, she asked that she might go out into the air, and when she stumbled at the door, turned pale, and was about to faint, the orderly, who understood these phenomena, with the help of a valid patient laid her all along upon a marble slab. It was only for a moment, and she returned to the room, saying, like the wounded man: "That's all right." The uninterrupted process of dressing made even her forget the incident. A kindly woman drew her into an embrasure and gave her a drop of cordial.
At that moment a man was being carried to the operating-room. He blustered a little as he addressed to his comrades the classic au revoir which may so well be an adieu: "I am going to my game of billiards!"
"Try to win, old fellow," they answered from all parts of the ward.
And, without flinching, Odette was present at "her" first operation.
She returned home at half past twelve, exhausted, but lighter in heart and satisfied with herself.
"Madame is pale," said Amelia. "Madame is the color of the lamp-shade when the lamp is lighted."
After luncheon she slept heavily for half an hour, and returned to the hospital. The afternoon was more calm, at least until the second visit of the head physician, before the men's six-o'clock meal. She made further acquaintance with her patients; she heard them talk about the war. She found occasion to say, "My poor husband was killed on the 22d of September," but it produced no great effect, none of those soldiers having known Lieutenant Jacquelin. Each told about what he had seen, and nothing else seemed to him to have a real existence. She was disappointed, but by their various touching stories of what they had been through, she was introduced to that war of which she had determined to know nothing since her husband was dead. The battles of the Yser, the sufferings of the combatants who had passed day after day in freezing water, the grotesque onslaughts of the Germans, the piles of dead under the ominous skies, set her imagination to work. Always thinking of her husband, she saw him all alone in the face of those infuriated enemies, trampled down by them.... He had gone out with drawn sabre from his little village, at the head of his company, and he had been killed outright. Before the survivors of the Yser she no longer dared speak of the circumstance of the lieutenant's death, beautiful though it was. This war seemed to be enlarging, growing beyond measure great.