Waiting through the raid alone.
I stayed it out—about twenty minutes—alone in that dark flagged hallway, and it was lonesome. When the shrapnel and machine-gun fire let up sufficiently to make it safe, I crept along under the shelter of the eaves to the door of a courtyard next door where I knew one of our cooks lived. She had invited me a few days before, to refuge there instead of trying to get over the abris, because, she said, the whole upper lofts were full of hay, and it had been demonstrated that bombs will not penetrate to any depth in hay. But the door was locked, and though I beat upon it with my electric torch, nobody heard me. I finally took advantage of a lull in the firing, when the Germans went back to their own lines for more ammunition, to get over the abris.
There one of the women on night duty at the canteen told me that the directrice and everybody else not on night duty, had gone up to the evacuation hospital about ten o'clock, in response to a call for aid from the French authorities.
Many wounded in the hospitals.
In E—— there were half a dozen large hospitals. The wounded, chiefly English, were coming in faster than the hospital corps could handle them. They needed our help, not only in registering the men—very few of whom understood any French—but in feeding and giving water.
I got to the hospital the next day and worked steadily till eight thirty. Then an ambulance driver gave me a lift as far as the canteen, and I managed to get a cold supper at our mess.
Dispensing hospitality to worn-out officers.
I was hardly in my office before I heard a knock at the door, which, as I was alone in the house, I always locked at night as soon as I entered. In response to my "Who's there?" a voice, guided by my English, replied, "I am an English officer." I threw open the door without a second's hesitation. A young officer, weary, white-faced, stood there, beginning to apologize as he saw my uniform and white veil. He was simply "done," he said—and he looked it. He had found every hotel was full, and, seeing a few gleams of light behind the shutters, he had knocked in the hope of finding shelter for the night. I knew that the woman at the canteen who would go off duty at midnight was scheduled to go immediately to the hospital to work until seven in the morning and that I could occupy her bed after I came back from the hospital, and I offered my apartment to the officer for the night. He was most grateful, and I rushed over to the canteen to get him a pitcher of hot water and a cup of chocolate. But there I found a group of French officers, who said they had neither sleep nor rest for three days and nights, pleading for some place to lie down. As there was a comfortable leather couch in my office, besides a wide soft couch over which I had laid my steamer rug, and, in addition, an exceedingly soft double bed in my room which I thought the tired Englishman ought to be willing to share with an equally tired man, I proffered my hospitality, which was gratefully accepted. I piloted them across to the office, and returned to the canteen, hoping to find an American ambulance boy who would run me over to the hospital.
A new raid begins.
Directing men to shelter.