Sad, oh, how sad! A little later Mother Mèchin comes and talks to me in a low voice about her son.
"Such a good boy, madame! He never gave us one hour of trouble. He fought so well, they say, and at home he was as gentle as a girl. And he didn't drink or waste his money. Just imagine, he has saved up a thousand francs, in little pieces, since he was a child. We didn't want him to cut into this money to go to the wars. We preferred to go without things ourselves to fit him out, and let him keep his little savings. He will be very glad of it when he gets married." Married! Alas, poor boy! A terrible spouse is waiting for him, one who will not give him up. But already he has marched before her with as much courage as now perhaps he guesses at her coming near. He is very feeble, but he makes a sign that he would like to speak to me. I bend over his bed, and he whispers in my ear:
"I took communion this morning: I am very glad."
I had just brought him a medal of the Holy Virgin. He smiled with pleasure, and I am moved to the bottom of my soul, seeing him kiss the medal and then place it on his heart.
All this time we are making the acquaintance of newer patients, as they are always coming into this ward, which is reserved for those that have undergone the most serious operations. "One never has the consolation of seeing them completely cured," Sister Gabrielle warned me with a sigh. I stop a moment before a little Turco, who took part in the battle of the Aisne. Both his legs are broken. His face stiffens with pain, and now and then a groan escapes him, though it is at once suppressed. He scolds himself about it, and warns himself, or calls me to witness, I am not sure which, when I hear him murmuring:
"Just look! When you think of the ones who stayed down there, ought you ever to groan? We are happier here. It isn't right."
Those who stayed down there! The imagination recoils before the picture evoked by those simple words; those who stay behind down there in the cold and the night, under constant menace by the barbarian enemy, who stay to suffer agonies alone, to die; to see their blood, without the help even of a single bandage, flow from their broken flesh and fall to the last drop upon the soil of France. I remember the words of another wounded soldier:
"After the battle, that day, you couldn't hear yourselves talk any more in the trenches for the cries of the wounded. It was like one great uninterrupted wail. You could make out appeals, prayers, calls for help, women's names. Then, little by little, silence came again, as a good many of them died. What we heard sound longest on the battlefield, from one end to the other, was the word 'Mother!' It is always those who are dying who call like that; we know that well now."
Alas! What do we not know now of the many-sided anguish and horror of death! We must certainly begin, like the little Turco, to qualify as lucky the fellows whom destiny delivers up to the hospital. And yet how they suffer, even these. To physical torture is added too often the worst tortures of the spirit.
"In the two months I've been away, not one bit of news of my family has reached me," a soldier told me, "except a despatch announcing my father's death."