“Tell me anything that would give you pleasure, Marie le Gallec?”
“Soup,” he answered promptly, in the most comic way.
Mme. Guérard hurried away to the kitchen and soon returned with a bowl of broth and pieces of toast. I placed the bowl on the little wooden shelf with four short legs which was so convenient for the meals of our poor sufferers. The wounded man looked up at me and said:
“Barra!” I did not understand, and he repeated: “Barra!” His poor chest caused him to hiss out the word, and he made the greatest efforts to repeat his emphatic request. I sent immediately to the Marine Office thinking that there would surely be some Breton seamen there, and I explained my difficulty, and my ignorance of the Breton dialect. I was informed that the word “barra” meant bread. I hurried at once to Le Gallec with a large piece of bread. His face lighted up and, taking it from me with his sound hand, he broke it up with his teeth and let the pieces fall in the bowl. He then plunged his spoon into the middle of the broth and filled it up with bread until the spoon could stand upright in it. When it stood up without shaking about, the young soldier smiled. He was just preparing to eat this horrible concoction when the young priest from St. Sulpice, who had my ambulance in charge, arrived. I had sent for him on hearing the doctor’s sad verdict. He laid his hand gently on the young man’s shoulder, thus stopping the movement of his arm. The poor fellow looked up at the priest, who showed him the Holy Cup.
“Oh!” he said simply, and then, placing his coarse handkerchief over the steaming soup, he put his hands together. We had arranged the two screens, which we used for isolating the dead or dying, around his bed. He was left alone with the priest while I went on my rounds to calm the murmurers, or help the believers to raise themselves for the prayer. The young priest soon pushed aside the partition, and I then saw Marie le Gallec, with a beaming face, eating his abominable bread sop. He fell asleep soon afterward, roused up to ask for something to drink, and died immediately, in a slight fit of choking.
Fortunately I did not lose many men out of the three hundred who came into my ambulance, for the death of the unfortunate ones completely upset me. I was very young at that time, only twenty-four years of age, but I could nevertheless see the cowardliness of some of the men, and the heroism of many of the others. A young Savoyard eighteen years old had had his forefinger taken off. Baron Larrey was quite sure that he had shot it off himself with his own gun, but I could not believe that. I noticed, though, that in spite of our nursing and care the wound did not heal. I bound it up in a different way, and the following day I saw that the bandage had been altered. I mentioned this to Mme. Lambquin, who was sitting up that night together with Mme. Guérard.
“Good; I will keep my eye on him; you go to sleep, my child, and count on me.”
The next day when I arrived she told me that she had caught the young man scraping the wound on his finger with his knife. I called him and told him that I should have to report this to the Val-de-Grâce Hospital. He began to weep and vowed to me that he would never do it again, and five days later he was well. I signed the paper authorizing him to leave the ambulance, and he was sent to the army of the defense. I often wondered what became of him.
Another of our patients bewildered us, too. Each time that his wound seemed to be just on the point of healing up, he had a violent attack of dysentery which threw him back. This seemed suspicious to Dr. Duchesne, and he asked me to watch the man. At the end of a considerable time, we were convinced that our wounded man had thought out the most comical scheme. He slept next the wall and therefore had no neighbor on the one side. During the night, he managed to file the brass of his bedstead. He put the filings in a little pot which had been used for ointment of some kind. A few drops of water and some salt mixed with this powdered brass formed a poison, which might have cost its inventor his life. I was furious at this stratagem. I wrote to the Val-de-Grâce, and an ambulance conveyance was sent to take this unpatriotic Frenchman away.
But side by side with these despicable men, what heroism we saw! A young captain was brought in one day. He was a tall fellow, a regular Hercules, with a superb head, and a frank expression. On my book he was described as Captain Menesson. He had been struck by a bullet at the top of the arm, just at the shoulder. With a nurse’s assistance I was trying as gently as possible to take off his cloak, when three bullets fell from the hood which he had pulled over his head, and I counted sixteen bullet holes in the cloak. The young officer had stood upright for three hours, serving as a target himself, while covering the retreat of his men as they fired all the time on the enemy. This had taken place among the Champigny vines. He had been brought in unconscious in a hospital conveyance. He had lost a great deal of blood, and was half dead with fatigue and weakness. He was very gentle and charming, and thought himself sufficiently well two days later to return to the fight. The doctor, however, would not allow this, and his sister, who was a nun, besought him to wait until he was something like well again.