Wandering about alone, as I have been doing a great deal lately, I have gone into many of the churches and prayed at the different shrines, and it is impressive to see the character of those who come in to pray. Men who can never kneel again; men who sit with bandaged eyes before the lighted altars, for whom all the visions of the world have been blotted out for ever; the poor women in their little shawls; women in their crape veils; the man going to the Front; the man who has come back from it, never to take an active part in life again; and the women who ask the Mother of Sorrows to remember theirs....
A very agreeable Abbé dined with me last night. He told me that he was giving absolution to one dying German boy—only sixteen—on the field, and he put his hand under the boy's head and lifted it, and the boy, who was delirious, simply said: "Mama, mama, mama!" And the Abbé said to me: "It is a very curious thing, but in all the dying appeals I have ever heard, it is always for the mother." That return, perhaps, to the lost childhood—the call just before going to sleep....
One day when I was giving electricity lately at the Ambulance, a poor little Zouave hobbled in—he had only one leg left—and held up a maimed hand for me to treat. He was not a very interesting-looking specimen—rather sullen and discouraged, I thought—but as I looked at his frail little body and his disfigured hand, I looked at his breast too. Three medals were on it—the Legion of Honor, the Croix de Guerre, and the Médaille Militaire—all a man can get! And he was just a little soldier of Africa—a nondescript man whose name would only be heard at other times to be forgotten.
Jacquemin.
"Qu'est-ce que vous avez fait pour mériter tout cela, mon ami?"
Pour mériter tout cela, parbleu! He has one leg only, one hand only, and he has back of him eight months of hospital and eight months of horror, for his sufferings have been beyond words.
Jacquemin!
Oh, his name is pretty well known now in a certain Sector!
"Qu'est-ce que vous aves fait pour mériter tout cela?"
Three medals across that narrow chest!