They were beginning to organize the hospital for the winter; certain persons insisted that the war would not be over in six months; others said with conviction: "Nor in eighteen months either!" But these were suspected of sowing demoralization. Yet the English were making preparations for three years! From her friend La Villaumer, who was still in Paris, Odette received letters in which he wrote:
"We are like children, sometimes gay, laughing and gamboling, at others howling, no one knows why. My dear friend, busy yourself with your work, and don't read the papers. As for me, there is something which impresses me more than the monstrous movements of the German colossus: it is the soul of the colossus. It is one; it has only one purpose, which is the greatness of the German nation. It is a rudimentary sentiment, savage, primitive, barbarous, but how strong! We ourselves are fighting because we have been attacked, and also to defend ideas which do us the greatest honor: liberty, justice, and the like. We are animated by a very lively sentiment of the rights of man. We love humanity; they, the Germans, love Germany. How much more simple it is, and how it relieves them of all the scruples that hold us back! And yet, in the final issue, it is he who shall have triumphed by force who will lay down the moral values of the future."
Thus, uncertainty, admiration, confidence, scepticism, and a state of alarm were concurrently implanted in minds, and Odette, affected by them, like every one else, began from that day to be infected, as with the odor of the hospital, with this irritating compound.
Little by little it seemed to her that she no longer upheld herself, but that she let herself be carried away, borne along and guided by the life of the hospital. It was at once horrible and almost laughable. A place of pain, the perpetual reminder of enormities which the human brain could never have conceived, it was also an assemblage dominated by youth, which saves all. In the gaze of those prostrate wounded, gaze which had become of so much importance to her who passed and repassed along the bedsides, burned a flame disturbing and alluring, result of the burning away of something that could not be named. At times, one felt as if in certain of those wounded men one saw beings returned from the beyond. They had seen what nothing had prepared them to see, something that confused them, both their senses and their judgment. Some of them said: "It was hell!" Others, much more simple-minded, merely said: "One must have been there!" Certain of them, without imagination or memory, living entirely in the present moment, shut up within themselves an unconscious gravity which was in strange contrast with their youthful natures. But in a general way a new nurse like Odette could aver:
"But the wounded are not sad!"
"Because," some one would reply, "they are all happy at not being dead."
Thus, day succeeded day, without softening Odette's personal sorrow, but as if shrouding it behind a mourning veil which covered all that she could imagine of earth's surface. Everything made her think of Jean, but she had not time to appear to be thinking of him, and she shrank from speaking of him.
She led a very active life. It would happen that just as she sat down at table, all alone in the evening in the Elizabeth pavilion, the door-bell would ring. It would be one of the volunteer employees, passing along on his bicycle to notify the nurses that a train of one hundred and twenty wounded men was announced to reach the station at eleven o'clock. By half past ten Odette, who would not take a nap, and who knew not what to do at home, was already at the hospital, in her cap and blouse. The more zealous ones were there, and the more indolent ones as well, welcoming the opportunity to get together and gossip. The head physician was coming and going, opening and shutting doors; the doctors were arriving one by one; the surgeon, all in white, his sleeves turned back to the elbows, was talking with the women. The telephone-bell rang; it was the police commissioner sending word that the train was an hour late. A few persons were in despair; there were some whom the matter moved to laughter. Every one waited. And sometimes the train, instead of one hour, was two or three hours late. Resignation became general in proportion as reasons for impatience accumulated. In the great hall where they were all assembled some seated themselves on anything they could find, others lay down upon stretchers. Bright conversation grew dim with the lights. White-robed women, going up or down stairs on tiptoe, seemed like angelic apparitions. Through the partitions came the heavy breathing of sleeping men. Suddenly the ringing of a bell startled every one; the train was drawing into the station at last. The lights were turned up. Ten minutes later the first automobiles were sounding in the court. The double-leaved doors were thrown wide, notwithstanding the cold, the stretcher-bearers rushed out, and in a moment, contrasting with their rapid bounds, came slowly the wounded soldiers, bleeding, bearded, covered with earth, wan, exhausted; some of them half-naked, some with frozen feet, upheld or carried by sturdy fifteen-year-old lads. All were silent, a religious respect hushed the words upon the lips. This torn flesh, these rags of French uniform, wrought in the mind of every being not utterly insensible a change in his idea of the pathetic; something of the atmosphere of the firing-line entered and asepticized every heart.
The next morning the sense of familiarity returned. But in that one hour of the dark winter night, while the surgeon, bending over each victim, was asking him almost tenderly: "And you, my child?"—something august, an exhalation of the colossal human sacrifice, penetrated into this commonplace old hotel hall, sanctifying it for all time to come. And not one of those men or women who had been there, however advanced the hour of the night, however visible the fatigue on all their faces, but was glad for having been there.
Whence came these wounded men? From Ypres, from Arras, from Notre-Dame de Lorette. The names called up all that any one knew, through newspapers and private talk, of those charnel-houses whose image the imagination refuses to harbor, upon which those who have escaped from them keep silence.