Journal Of Small Things - free ebook by Helen Mackay

JOURNAL OF SMALL THINGS

BY HELEN MACKAY New York DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 1917...

8 minute read

Read Chapter

PREFACE

Those who have read Mrs. Mackay's book, which she entitled Accidentals , will know exactly what to expect from her new book, Journal of Small Things . Like the early one it consists of a series of little sketches more or less in the form of a diary, vignettes taken from a very individual angle of vision, pictures in which the hand of the painter moves with exquisite fineness. They are singularly graceful, very delicate and also very pathetic, these random memories of a sympathetic friend of Fran

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Sunday, July 26th, 1914

When we came back from Mass, up from the village by the rue du Château and through the park and the garden, the yesterday's papers were arrived from Paris. I delayed down in the parterres, it was so beautiful. There had been rain, and the sunshine was golden and thick on all the wet sweet things, the earth of the paths, the box edges, the clipped yews, the grass of the lawns, the roses and heliotrope and petunias in the stately garden beds. There is a certain smell in old formal gardens, that se

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, July 27th

The papers make things look better; we think it cannot be, cannot possibly be. But I am always afraid, because of my dreams. My dreams have been very bad all night. I was in the potager most of the morning, working hard. In the afternoon some neighbors came to tea. They came from quite far, motoring across the forests, and none of them had known the house. I loved showing them the old place that is not mine, the colours that are faded and worn till they have become beautiful, the things that by

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Tuesday, July 28th

One feels, in all these days, as if there were a great storm coming up. I keep thinking all of the time, there is a great storm coming up. That is an absurd thing to make note of, as if it had some strange meaning, as if it were not just that in all these days, really, always there is a storm coming up. I never have known such storms, nor yet such sunsets. The sunsets are like the reflection of great battlefields beyond the world. One is frightened because of the sunsets, more than because of th

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Wednesday, July 29th, late of the night

I went up to Paris. I thought if I could feel how Paris felt to-day, I would know if the menace is real. Here one knows nothing. There is sunshine and rain, and the fields are white to the harvest, the heat hangs over the long white roads, and the shade of the forests is grateful. The people of the little town go about their ways; their sabots clatter on the cobbles, and their voices have part with the shrilling of cigale and the call of the swallows. The children out of school, at noon and at s

4 minute read

Read Chapter

Thursday, July 30th

Early in the morning a friend of mine telephoned from her people's château across the two forests, to tell me that her husband was arranging for her to take the babies to-morrow up to Paris. He said that in '70 the Germans had come that way, by the grand old historic road, down upon Paris. The château had then passed through dreadful times. If there were war he would have to go out on the first day. He would have his babies then far off from the danger he did not, of course, believe in. She told

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Friday, July 31st

The beggars came as usual to the château for their Friday morning sous. There were the usual dozen of them; old men, and women with babies, and old women, and Margotte, the girl who was innocente , with her nodding head and hands that would never keep still. They came out of their holes in the marble quarries, and from nobody knew quite where, according to their long custom. All that was just as usual. But they were not as usual. They were angry because Venus and Olga, the great Danes of the moa

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Saturday, August 1st

This has been the day of waiting. Everywhere, every one waited. In the Place aux Armes people stood and waited. The men waited to be told what to do. The women waited, each one of them staying close to her man. The children hung on to their fathers' hands. In all the little towns along the road to Paris it was like that. In the larger towns there was much movement of soldiers about in the streets. All the red képis were covered with blue. I wondered why. The fields were empty. The work of the fi

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Paris, Sunday, August 2nd

First day of the mobilization, the state of siege is declared throughout France. Already the many gardens of this old quarter are deep in the colours and odours and melancholy of autumn, and give autumn's fatefulness and foreboding to all the streets and rooms. I thought when I waked to it, has this sense of autumn always meant the end of many more things than summer? With one's coffee to read— First day of the mobilization, the state of war is declared throughout France. How silent this Paris i

41 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, August 3rd

They go. They all go. There is nothing I can say of it. I can only feel it, as they go. I, I am a stranger, I have no part in it. I have no right to agony and pride. I went and sat on a bench in the Cour la Reine , where already the leaves are falling. One of my friends came and met me there, and we sat on the bench together, where the yellow leaves fell slowly. We never talked at all. Her husband had gone the night before. She said, "I am so glad that it is now , when my boy is just a baby." Sh

40 minute read

Read Chapter

Tuesday, August 4th

Other people will write beautiful things of it—it is so beautiful. How beautiful it is, this going forth of all that is young and gay and fearless, of all that means our ideal and our faith, without singing and shouting, to battle. There are no grand words, they only go. And none of the women cry, till afterwards. You see them laughing as they help their boys carry the bundles. And you see them coming home through the streets afterwards, each one alone and proud, crying quite noiselessly. Someti

46 minute read

Read Chapter

Wednesday, August 5th

I keep thinking back over those last days of peace, that were so precious, and nobody knew. The Sunday that was to be the last, what memories has it given the women to treasure, the men to carry away with them? Memories of such small absurd things have become sacred, or become terrible. The men may lose those memories in their great spaces of battle, but the women must stay with them in the rooms. Against the great background of these days it is queer what small absurd things stand out. The grea

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Thursday, August 6th

Poor little Charlotte's baby was born to-day, the day after its father went out. And it is dead. A boy—and he had so wanted it to be a boy....

8 minute read

Read Chapter

Friday, August 7th

To-day I went with a friend of mine to Notre Dame des Victoires , where she prayed. All those starry lights, and all that dusk of kneeling, beseeching people....

9 minute read

Read Chapter

Saturday, August 8th

In the afternoon went with Chantal to the Gare d'Orsay , then to the Austerlitz, and the Lyon, trying to find a way for her and the babies to go home to the Vaucluse. People are camped out about the stations; all the streets are full of them, waiting to get places in the line before the ticket windows. Foulques came to dine. It is his last night. He goes out to-morrow. He was very quiet. I have never seen him quiet like that before. Last night, down in the country, he had got through with all th

55 minute read

Read Chapter

Sunday, August 9th

Mimi's birthday: cake with six candles, and the little girl from upstairs come with her Miss to tea....

5 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, August 10th

There is a sort of dreadful comfort in knowing that their going off is over. They are gone. The women saw them off, helped them hurry their things together—those bundles, boots, something to eat in the train. Every one had laughed. The last things are over—the last night, when he slept so well and she watched; the last sitting down at the table together; the last standing together in the room; his last look around it, and her last seeing of him there; the going out at the door. The last going ou

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Tuesday, August 11th

Eliane let me come to-day, for the first time since her boy went, on the Tuesday. She has changed so, one can scarcely believe it, in just these few days. She does not look young any more. How badly he would feel; he always loved his pretty little mother to look young. He loved it when people took her for his sister, and how delighted he was that time she went to see him when he was in barracks, and the captain was shocked. She is no more young and pretty and she does not care. Her eyes looked a

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Arras, August 16th

It was a heavy grey day, very still. People were telling one another that all the news was good. The first German flag taken had been brought to Paris: one could go that day to the Ministry of War to see it. I wished I could have waited in Paris over a day to go to see it. I thought, it will be the first thing I do, to go to see it, when I come back next week. It was interesting to think that we went around by Arras because British troops were detraining at Amiens. It was all of it splendid, and

1 minute read

Read Chapter

London, September

The night Ian went out was pretty bad. There were several other officers with him, and their wives and mothers and sisters and children all came to see them off. Every one knew quite well what it meant, and every one pretended not to know. I had come to feel, like the rest of them, that one has simply got to pretend. We all pretended as hard as we could that it was splendid. There was a woman on the platform who must have been crazy, I think. She did not belong to any one going out. She was one

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Paris, end of September

I have come home for six days. "I am here," I keep saying to myself, "I am here, at home," as if I could not believe it. And those homeless people, that they begged for at all the stations where the train stopped on our way, those driven, herded people, stupid from horror they have passed through, helpless, in my home I keep imagining them. Where the train stopped in the dark at half-lit stations, people of the Red Cross came asking help, "Pour nos blessés, pour nos refugiés." Somehow, in my lit

1 minute read

Read Chapter

London, November

I go to the little Soho church of Our Lady of France, to just stay there, not praying or anything. I go just to be with a people who are far from their country in her great need. Most of them are very humble people. There is a smell of poverty always in the little dark church. They are people to whom "home" can mean only some small poor place and things, a thatched cabin, a vineyard, a mansarde over a cobbled street. They kneel in the little dark church and sing— while alien feet tread hearts do

35 minute read

Read Chapter

Paris, just before Christmas

I try not to write. The only things worth saying are the things I do not know how to say. Every morning people take up the day like a burden. They carry its weight of dread along the hours, down the length of them to the end. Night comes at last, and they can lay the burden down, perhaps, for a little. When it is over they will look back and know how beautiful this winter was, and what high places they had sight of from the strange far journeyings of the days. When it is over they will know that

36 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, August 2nd, 1915

We thought we had to get away. But there is no getting away. One feels it almost more in the country and in the little towns than in Paris, where life, somehow or other, keeps on. The country stands so empty. The men are gone. They are gone from the cornfields and vineyards and pastures. They are gone from thatched roofs and tiled roofs. From wide white poplar-bordered roads, and steep cobbled streets, and hill paths that are like the beds of mountain torrents, from the wide way of the river, an

57 minute read

Read Chapter

The Town

The town is the colour of honey and burnt bread, its walls and gates and roofs, its castle and tour sarazine and the tall tower of the cathedral. The tower, a tall campanile, makes one think of Italy, as do the open stone loggie, and garlands and trellises of vines. Sometimes I think the town speaks to me in Italian. I try to understand, and then I know that it is not Italian, nor yet quite Latin, but the grand old tongue of the illumined pages of its princes' Mass books. And then again it speak

29 minute read

Read Chapter

The Saint

The vines and fields come close about the town that for so long has counted its years by vintages; the good year of the purple grapes, the poor year of the white grapes. The town has had its part in many wars, but that was long ago. It has a patron saint, a shepherd boy, who saved it in three wars, miraculously. But it does not ask him for help in this war. He is too intimate and near. The town is too used to asking him that the spring rains may not wash the vines, that a frost may not come to h

42 minute read

Read Chapter

The River

I know why the river goes so slowly, lingering as much as ever she can, and a little sadly. It is because just here she leaves behind her youth and wildness of great mountains, her mood of snows and rocks, cascade and woods and high rough pastures, cow-bells and mountain-horn. Going down into the classic countries, infinitely old, those deep, rich countries, she passes here, between the high clear lift and lilt and thrill of mountain music and the cadenced melody of Provence....

22 minute read

Read Chapter

The old Estampe

There is an old print in the library of the castle, that shows the town, her hill become a mighty mountain, the river a terrific flood, the castle guns emitting huge neat clouds of smoke upon the army of Savoy. You see the army of Savoy, in plumes and velvet cloaks, withdrawing upon prancing steeds, and the lords of the town issuing forth from the Roman gate with bugles and banners. They were gorgeous, gallant little wars that the sons of the town rode out to in those days....

24 minute read

Read Chapter

The Dépôt d'Eclopés

The dépôt d'éclopés is just beyond the town, on the Roman road. The building was once the Convent of the Poor Claires. When the Sisters were sent away it was used as Communal Schools. There is a great plane tree outside the door in the yellow wall, and a bench in the shade. There is room for seven éclopés to sit crowded together on the bench. They bring out some chairs also. All day long, and every day, as many of the éclopés as can get about, and do not mind that the road see them, and can find

4 minute read

Read Chapter

The Cathedral

The Place de la Cathédrale is full of hot red sunset, taken and held there, like wine in the chalice of old golden walls. The old golden walls of the houses that once were palaces lift up the shape of a cup to the wine of the sunset, a vessel of silence and slow time. Now every night at sunset the bells of the Cathedral are ringing, and people are coming into the Place from the St. Réal and the rue Croix d'Or and the tunnel street, under the first stories of the Palais du Maréchal , that is call

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Americans

He did not seem so very ill. He had not that look of being made of wax. And he talked all the time. Most of them die so silently. He lay in the bright ward and talked all of the time. He had enlisted in the Foreign Legion and fought since the beginning, and was wounded last week in the Argonne. He wanted me to sit beside him and listen. I hated the things he said. He said he was a fool, they all were fools, and they all knew it now. He said there was no glory. They had thought that war was glori

1 minute read

Read Chapter

An Altar

From the narrow deep old street you turn in under an arch to a vaulted passage that is always dark and cold. It looks into a court that once was very proud. Now a wholesale wine merchant has heaped his tuns one upon another in one corner, and in another corner a carpenter has his saws and benches and great logs of mountain oak and pine. There are the smells of wine and fresh-cut wood together with the smell of stones and ages in the court. The houses about the court still keep something of their

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital

One long side of the hospital looks from its rows of windows to vineyards and the mountains. The smell of burning brushwood comes in, to the smell of the hospital. Through all the vineyards these days they are burning the refuse of the vines. The smoke stays among the vines, lingering heavily. The purple smoke and the red and purple wine colours of the vines, and the purple mists of the distances, gathered away into the purple shadows of the mountains, make one think at twilight of the music of

3 minute read

Read Chapter

The Omelet

The vine was red on the white old soft wall. It was very beautiful. There were masses of purple asters under the red vine, against the wall. There was a bowl of purple asters on the table between the carafes of red and white vine. We had an omelet and bread and butter and raspberries, and water, very beautiful in the thick greenish glasses. Under the yellow boughs of the lime tree we could see the misty valley and the mountains. The table had a red-and-white cloth. The little old thin brown woma

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Gentilhommière

The road, up through the vineyards and pastures and fields of maize and of buckwheat, was like the bed of a mountain torrent, all tossed down, and grey and stony, between the poplars. In other years it had been a well enough kept little road, but in this year there was no one to care for it. And surely it had been a mountain torrent, in the spring's last melting of snows and in the heavy rains of the summer. Who was there left to mend it? Or who, indeed, to travel it? We climbed it slowly in the

3 minute read

Read Chapter

Château

The gates stand open. Some one has broken open the gates. Or perhaps no one had troubled to close them. The porter's lodge, under the limes, is empty. The avenue of ancient, stately lime trees that leads to the château, is overgrown, in this one year, deep with grass and moss. The trees, that have not been trimmed, shade it too darkly. The leaves of the lime-trees are falling. In another year it would seem strange if the leaves fell so, before the end of August; but in this year no death seems s

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Shopping

In the library of the Octagon I found some little etchings of these old streets and courtyards and allées murées , steep roofs and balconies and open loggie, carved windows and doorways, corners and turnings, done beautifully by someone who had surely understood them. He had known how the smell of old wood and stone strikes out from certain shadows and stabs you in the heart; and the sudden sharp loneliness you feel because of dead leaves driven against the tower stairs. The librarian said, "He

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Mountains

The inn, up in the rough stony town of the high mountains, was forlorn enough. There were some dogs and chickens about the door of it, in the wet street. The woman who came to the door of the inn was one of those thin, dark pale, quiet women about whom there is always something sympathetic and sad. She said, she feared the inn could do us little honour; we must forgive, because of the war. The stone hall was narrow and cold, the stairs went straight up from the farther end of it, and two doors o

6 minute read

Read Chapter

The Little Maître d'Hotel

Our little worried grey butler is gone. His class has been called out, the class of Quatre-vingt-douze . It appears he was only forty-three. I had thought he was sixty at least. It must be because he has been anxious all his life that he seems so old. He was terribly worried and anxious when he talked to me, the night before he went, about the old father and mother he must leave. He would be going probably only somewhere back of the lines to guard a bridge or a railway, but for him it meant—who

42 minute read

Read Chapter

The Garage

There are twelve convalescents installed after a fashion in the garage half-way down the field path. They are so nearly well that they can make up their beds and sweep out their rooms and wash at the pump and go down to eat at the canteen of the hospital Sainte Barbe. They go to the Clinique there every second or third or fourth day. An orderly comes up from there once in a while with clean linen for them. And that is all they need be troubled about. They are quite comfortable and very forlorn.

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Francine

The son of Francine is home on leave. Francine comes every day to help in the kitchen. She was scrubbing the kitchen's grey stone flags when her son came. He came swinging up the path between the wheat and poppies and cornflowers. He came up the terrace steps, in his leggings and his béret, a fine young diable bleu. Francine came, running, wiping her red hands in her apron, suddenly beautiful and very proud....

20 minute read

Read Chapter

Railway Station, The Days of the 25th

The trains of wounded arrive almost always at dawn, the late autumn dawn. The lamps of the station are still burning, but grow pale. Beyond the open platform, across the tracks, you can see that dawn has come to the sky, behind the mountains. There is a star in the midst of the dawn, Hesper, star of both the twilights, very big and bright and near, like a lamp. It is very cold. In the pale light of the dawn and the pale light of the station lamps they wait for the train of wounded to come in. Th

1 minute read

Read Chapter

New Ones

It was for this that they evacuated last week all who could possibly be moved, to fill the wards with other broken things. They gathered up all the broken things that had lain here so long, and sent them away. And now the wards are full of other broken things. The old ones had grown accustomed to the rooms. They had suffered and been unhappy in these rooms, and when they had to go away they did not want to go. They had nothing left but the place and people of their suffering, and they found, whe

40 minute read

Read Chapter

Deaths

It is quite simple. If it can be that the priest comes, it is very well. All that the priest does is beautiful. The feet and hands, the eyes, the lips have sinned, and the touch of forgiveness upon them is exquisite. It is exquisite, that last entering in of the Divine Body to the body that is dying. But if for any reason no priest comes, if no one cares or troubles to ask for him, or if there is no time, God is most surely there and understands. And one is comforted to find that there is no nee

43 minute read

Read Chapter

Another Winter, Thursday, October 7th

When the rain had gone over, in the late afternoon, and the clouds were lifted and drifted a little, we saw that there was snow on all the near mountains, through the pines, upon the pastures. The cold wet street was full of excited swallows. Here was the cold. The cold was come too soon. They never yet had gone south so early. Dear me, dear me—where would they stop the night? Up under all the old shaggy rusty eaves, that reach out over the narrow streets, hundreds and hundreds of swallows were

59 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, October 11th

I was thinking all night in the train—how can I look at them, how can I speak to them in their depth of grief? I was thinking—when the old woman comes to open the door, what can I say to her? When the old man comes to take my big dressing-case and my little dressing-case, and my strap of books, how can I face him? Their son is dead. The son of our concierge is dead. "Mort au Champ d'Honneur." They were so proud of him. They did so worship him. He was such a clever boy that he had gone beyond any

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Same day, 11th of October

The first thing to do was to go up to my neighbour's queer big kitchen—up on the roofs—because there were eleven little soldiers at supper, to whom, though I have not been here to see them until now, I must say good-bye. It is the last day of their leave, they will be off to-morrow. Always my permissionnaires eat with my neighbour's permissionnaires together in the kitchen on the roof. They are always men from the invaded countries, who have nowhere to go for their leave. Before, they have alway

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Tuesday, October 12th The Chocolates

I went to get some chocolates at a little shop near the hospital. The woman of the shop counted me out the heap of chocolates one by one in their silver paper. She was a thin pale little woman with the sort of blue eyes that are always sad. Her eyes looked as if they had cried and cried, in her worn faded little face. She had the little woollen cape of the quarter around her shoulders and her pale hair was rather grey. While she was counting the chocolates the postman came. He brought a big squa

56 minute read

Read Chapter

The Goldfish and the Watch

On a table in the window there was an opal-blue bowl full of water, with purple iris floating in it, and little bright goldfish, four of them, glinting through it. Some one had given it that day to the children. René, the eldest boy, stood by the table watching the goldfish, not thinking of his father at all. There were minutes in the days when he did not think of his father. But afterwards it was always the same thing. He never told any one, because he was seven years old and very shy. No one w

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital, Friday, October 15th

Just these days the people of several of the men have been coming from far to see them. Way off, in some little town of Brittany or the Béarn, or Provence, there had arrived word that the soldier this or that had been wounded thus or so, and was at the hospital. Upon months and months of waiting in dreadful, helpless ignorance, the shock had come as a relief almost. But how strange and terrible a thing the journey was to people who could understand so little what they must do. Where to go, what

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital, Sunday, October 17th Number 24

Number twenty-four is dying. I am very glad. It is much better for him that he should die. But it takes so long. It is terrible that it should take so long to die. He calls me, " Ma petite dame ." "My little lady, what time is it?" Strange, how they ask that, so many of them, when they are dying. There is a clock on the wall opposite his bed. They tell me that for three weeks he has not been able to see it. He says the room is full of mist. He says, "My little lady, can you see the clock?" I alw

39 minute read

Read Chapter

La Mort d'un Civil

The old Monsieur is dying. He has been dying for days and days and days. He is dying at a time when death is very cheap. Every one is dying. The youth of the whole world is being taken away. What does it matter at all that an old man, who has no part in the war, is taken away? Who, except his elderly maiden daughter, has time to care? Cousine Gertrude is very kind. She comes every evening, after the hospital, and stays for two hours, sitting in the room, knitting grey socks, while his daughter r

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Canal

In all the mornings and nights, going to the hospital and coming back from it, I love my canals. The canals of Venice, of Holland, rivers and great waterfalls and fountains and the waterways of kings' gardens, that people travel far to find beautiful, are beautiful for all the world. But my canal is beautiful for just me. Its narrow stone-bound curve is hung over by uncared-for plane-trees, and by ragged, jagged, rickety, crooked houses, that lilt and tilt and lean together and over, dingy and d

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital

My hospital was, all of it, built in the time that means lovely things of red-brick and grey stone and blue gables. The courtyards are paved with huge ancient cobbles, and there are grass plots that are green and wet, and big trees and bushes whose leaves are falling slowly in blue stillness. There are more than two thousand sick in my hospital, six hundred wounded of the war, one hundred and fifty of them in our service. I love to write "my" hospital and "our" service....

23 minute read

Read Chapter

Madame Marthe Hospital, Tuesday, October 19th

Things had been very bad all day. When night came it seemed dreadful to go away and leave so much suffering. I thought of the night, with fever and that special helplessness which belongs to the night. I would have been so glad to stay the night out with the ward. I said that to Madame Marthe, as we left together. She said, "But why?" She always has a cold and wears a little blue woollen cape over her blouse and apron. When she leaves the hospital she pins up the two black ribbon streamers of he

50 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital Things They Say

Perhaps in other, different kinds of hospitals, hospitals of the little good sisters, or of ladies of the Red Cross, hospitals of beautiful influences, one could not love the men so much. In hospitals where the beautiful things of the Faith, prayers and tenderness and peace, are all around about the pain and death; and there are words for praise of courage and sacrifice, and words for sympathy and for hope, and words for high ideals; where it is as poets and painters and all people have always i

6 minute read

Read Chapter

The Patronne

I take off my cloak and blue veil in the patronne's room. The patronne is usually sitting at her desk. Sometimes she says good morning to me, and sometimes she doesn't. She used to be fille de salle in this hospital, she used to clean these stairs and corridors; then she rose to be infirmière in the ward where I work now, and then panseuse. She is a huge gaunt raw-boned sorrel-coloured woman, who looks like a war-horse. She is so alive and quick that you feel her personality stronger than anythi

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Madame Marthe Again

I don't know at all how it happens that a little white mouse of a woman of the people, who has worked and worked all her life, and never been cared for by anybody, should have beautiful hands. But Madame Marthe has beautiful hands. Her hands are small and quick and absolutely sure. They tremble when things are bad, but in spite of that they are certain and sure. They never make a mistake. And they are not afraid of anything. Sometimes my hands are afraid to touch things, and then I am ashamed. S

42 minute read

Read Chapter

The Ward—All Souls' Day

There are twenty-eight beds against the walls of the ward and ten stretcher-beds down the middle of its long clear bright length. Between the beds there is no room to push the dressing cart about, it stands close up against the apparatus of dressings. There are some things that make stains on the whiteness of the ward. When I am away from it, I see those things standing out against the whiteness. There is the blue of the sublimé in the glass tank of the dressing cart, and there is the green of t

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital, Thursday, November 11th

The sparrows were all talking together in the trees of the great central court of the hospital. I met Madame Bayle as usual in the first court. We almost always meet there, as I arrive and she is crossing to the store-house on the other side of the entrance. Usually we stop and stand a minute, listening to the conversation of the sparrows. Madame Bayle is the chief of the linen-room of our pavilion. She is a dreadful fat shining shuffling person, who hates me because I wear white shoes. Also bec

8 minute read

Read Chapter

Number 14 Sunday, December 5th

The mother of little 14, Louis, has come to see him. When I came into the ward this morning, I was frightened to see that there were people about the bed of little Louis. I don't know why we always call him little Louis, for he is a great long boy as he lies there in his bed; he must have stood splendidly tall and strong before. But it was only that Madame Marthe and Madame Alice were standing there, talking with a tall fine woman, who wore the black shawl and small black ribbon cap of the count

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, December 6th

In the cold, rainy, windy early morning there was a regiment of infantry, with all its camping things, battle things, marching across the Place de la Bastille, going out. Long blue coat and blue-covered képi, blanket rolled up in a big wheel, knapsack and cartridge-belt, flask and drinking-cup, bayonet and gun. And each man had a bit of mimosa or a few violets or a little tight hard winter rosebud buttoned into his coat, or stuck in his képi, or in the muzzle of his gun. I think most of one smar

55 minute read

Read Chapter

Madame Alice Thursday, December 9th

These last days Madame Alice has been even more sullen than usual. She arrives in the morning, they tell me—she arrives at six and I am never there to see—with a long face, and will say good day to nobody, and grumbles because somebody's handkerchief, or somebody's bag of raffia grasses, or somebody's package of letters, had fallen from his night-table to litter her floor. She grumbles about "pigs," and bangs things. When I arrive I find her still grumbling and banging. This morning she was wash

3 minute read

Read Chapter

Saturday, December 11th

To-day I have been seeing the little old curé of Jadis-sur-Marne . I found out, after all this time, where he was; and went and sat with him for an hour, in a pleasant sunny room of the house where they take care of him. He did not know me at first, but afterwards he seemed quite pleased. I want to tell this story of him. One Sunday, months and months and ages and ages and ages ago, Monsieur le Curé of Jadis-sur-Marne , began his discourse in a wrath righteous indeed. It was the Sunday that nobo

5 minute read

Read Chapter

The last Sunday of Peace: Remembering July 26th, 1914

When they came back from Mass, up through the château woods and the park and across the gardens, Anne Marie and Raoul walked together, and Anne Marie knew how happy she was. She had been happy every day of her eighteen years, but that day she realized it. Before she was quite awake she had been happy because of birds and church bells and sunshine and the fragrances of the garden. Snuggled down in the pillows that smelled of rose petals, she was happy because of her new white dress and the poppy

3 minute read

Read Chapter

Cantine, Christmas

All the babies seem to me to be blonde and of exactly the same size and quite square, about one year old, square, and very adorable. I never can remember which are the boys and which the girls. The mothers come from, we don't know where; and are, we don't know what. Last year there was written on a card and posted on the wall by the door, a thing that I think rather beautiful— "Toute femme enciente, ou qui nourrit son enfant, peut venir tous les jours prendre ici ses repas de midi et du soir, sa

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Perfectly Well

The patronne was standing by the bed of little 10. I said, "It does not go well, little 10?" He said, "Not too well, madame." His poor face was twitching, and his poor hands on the sheet. The patronne said to me, "He has given us a bad night, that sort of a horror there." She stood with her hands purple on her broad hips and looked at him, and said, "Espèce d'horreur, veux-tu finir de nous en m——" He laughed and I laughed. It is dreadful, but I can bear it better like that. The little good siste

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital, New Year's Day, 1916

What made me dreadfully want to cry was that they all, every one of them, wished me good health—little Louis, who is dying, and all the rest of them....

9 minute read

Read Chapter

The Apache Baby—Wednesday, January 5th—Cantine

They telephoned from the cantine that the baby of the girl Alice was dead at the hospital, and that the funeral was to be from there that afternoon at three o'clock, and that Alice wanted me to come. Mademoiselle Renée, the économe, who telephoned, said it was the apache girl with the ear-rings. I don't know why she wanted me to come to the funeral of her baby. Of the nearly three hundred women who came twice every day to the cantine, she had never been especially my friend. Her baby had been a

8 minute read

Read Chapter

Gégène's Croix de Guerre, One Thursday

When Gégène went to the Invalides to receive his Croix de Guerre, in the great Court of Honour, there was no one to go with him except Madame Marthe and me. Gégène belongs to nobody. He is an "enfant de l'Assistance Publique." There is nobody nearer to him than the peasants he was hired out to work for, somewhere down in Brittany. I do not know whether or not they were kind to him, whether or not they cared about his going off to war, or would take interest in the honours he has won. We know not

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Empty Memories

Seventeen months after the day when he went out for the first time, he was killed beside his mitrailleuse. He had been home in the meanwhile twice on leave, and there had been nothing changed. He had won many honours, and she supposed the other woman had been proud of him. For herself she had seen him very little and always pleasantly. She was glad now that it had been only pleasantly. But it was the day of that first August, the day of his first going, that one day, that one hour, she kept livi

3 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital

Often I am sad because I cannot worry enough about the 11, Charles. I forget him even when I am in the ward. His is the bed I see first when I look through the holes of the paint in the glass-topped door, opposite, away at the far end of the ward. There he has been, always, every day, through all the endless months since the Marne, propped up against a table board and two pillows and a sheet of black rubber. He breathes always more and more painfully, and coughs always more and more. The fever l

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Hautiquet

Hautiquet has gone back to the front. He would not let them tell me he was going. I never saw him to say good-bye. Last night, I said, as usual, "Bon soir, tout le monde, au revoir à demain!" And Hautiquet said with the rest, "A demain, Madame." He left a little package to be given to me after he was gone. He was one of the older ones. He had been ill in the first winter with rheumatism and pleurisy. He went back and fought all summer, and all through the Champagne, and till Christmas. Then he g

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Jean Fernand

He had curly yellow hair and big blue eyes. He got well terribly fast. I was wishing all the time that he would take longer about it. He was so young. His eyes were so blue, and round, and had seen all the horrors of the great retreat. The look of those things had stayed in his round young blue eyes. He told me he was afraid of going back, but that he was glad to go because "tous les copains sont là." He said he couldn't bear to think of them there, when he was safe out of it. "It is as if they

50 minute read

Read Chapter

Wednesday, February 9th Post Card

Boinet is very happy to-day. He has news of his people at last. Since he left them in the first days, all through these months and months, it has been as if they had been simply swept away out of the world. Everything that Boinet loved was swept away by the great black wave of the war. Into what depth of the end of all things all his life has been swept away! He has been imagining and imagining. He says, all the time in the trenches he was tortured by imagining things that might have happened to

1 minute read

Read Chapter

The New 25

He is of Morocco, brown and very lonely, and always shivering with cold. He speaks scarcely any French. His great dark eyes look to one with all the sadness of the eyes of animals that are dumb. Nobody understands him. He smiles up at us, with his beautiful white teeth and his big dumb eyes, and does not understand what we are saying. He makes me little magic-lanterns out of orange rinds, and tells me long stories about them, of which I understand not a word. Once when I went back, just for an a

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Marketing

He was standing half turned away from the others, the fat old woman in the woollen knitted shawl and a girl with a pretty brown bare head. He was holding a big market basket very carefully in both hands. I thought there was something odd about the careful way he held it and the way he stood, his head turned to one side and hanging a bit. The old woman and the girl were talking very much about the cabbages, with the woman of the push-cart, also old and also wearing a knitted woollen shawl. In the

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital

The wards of "our" floor get always all the light there is. When there is sunlight it all comes in and picks the dust motes up and sets them dancing, down steep slants and ladders. When there is wind it sobs and sings along the wards and corridors. The rain makes wide sweeps of the great windows, and mists press very close against them and get into the wards and drift there. When there was snow, in these few days the rooms were all full of its whiteness. Almost it was as if its silence were ther

27 minute read

Read Chapter

Saturday, March 5th

The night was full of great bells booming, Verdun, Verdun, Verdun. And yet there were no bells. I never saw a darker morning come to Paris. The darkness came into the room, thick and wet and cold. I had my breakfast by firelight. The crows are back already in the garden; the bare black treetops were full of them this dark morning, and not one of them stirred or made a sound. The lamps of the trams were lighted, and the lamps of the streets and quays and bridges. The river is very high, the trees

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Same day

In the half dark I came home along the canal. In these nights, coming home from the hospital, I have learned always more and more that the canal is beautiful, curving down between its old poor black tumbling houses, under its black bridges. To-night the few lights of the quays and of windows fell into the water of the canal, just odds and ends of gold. I stopped and stood and looked. It had been a bad day in my ward. I thought, how beautiful ugly things are become!...

25 minute read

Read Chapter

Saturday night before Easter

The cool wet fresh smells of the garden, and of all the gardens of the quarter, come in at my wide window. It is almost midnight, the rain has stopped, and it is not cold any more. Sometimes the crows talk together from the top of the trees where their nests are, above the old low roofs my window looks across. There has been for days now, in all the rain and cold, a drift of green about the trees, the fine green mesh of a veil that seems to float, it is so bright and frail, about the black wintr

44 minute read

Read Chapter

Easter Day

It is wonderful that spring should come on Easter Day. One waked—and lo, winter was over and passed. There was a moment, in waking, of not being able to believe at all in unhappiness. The nightingale was singing, the sun was coming up out of the filmy leaves of the garden, the bells of all the churches were pouring out Easter. The river was misty in the early morning, under the sunshine, mauve and opal and blue. The trees of the quays, in their fragile leaf, seemed to drift in the mist and sunsh

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Frogs

She, his mother, wished he wouldn't be so sweet. It was what she had longed for since he was a little boy, an indifferent, cold little child, and dreamed of. It made it difficult for her not to break down. And how dreary that would be for him, who was so glad to come home. Always he had been very bored at home. He never since he was at all grown-up—he was twenty-one—had stayed an hour more than was necessary in the old dark sad castle. Now he had six days, just six days, for his own, to do with

4 minute read

Read Chapter

Thursday, April 27th

Under the walls of St. Germain des Prés , and the chestnut trees in their spring misty leaf of amber and topaz and ruby, a vendor of, I don't know what, had set up a little booth and shaded it with an indigo blue bit of canvas. The shade was deep purple under the blue canvas, and brass and bronze and copper and rust-red things had vague shapes in the shadow. It was so beautiful that I was happy for all of a minute, passing in the tram on my way to the cantine....

26 minute read

Read Chapter

The Boy with Almond Eyes

They tell me that when they suffer I make little growling noises in my throat. They laugh and say, "Now the little Madame is angry!" I am angry, I am furious. I am furious against suffering. I hate suffering. If they scream I do not mind so much, but when they suffer silently, it is terrible. Once the ward doctor thought I was going to cry. I was holding the stump of a boy's leg while they dressed it. The leg had been cut off at the Front, hurriedly, anyhow, and the nerves left exposed. The boy

51 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, May 1st

To-day is so beautiful, many people must have been happy for a moment just in waking. It is so difficult not to be happy. It is such a wonderful thing to open one's blinds to a sunshiny May morning. And then there has to be the next moment....

13 minute read

Read Chapter

May 3rd

In other years also the spring was sad. There was always that exquisite lovely poignant sadness of spring. These days are too beautiful. It seems as if one could not bear them. I think it is because so much beauty makes one want happiness. One cannot understand, in such loveliness, why one is not happy. Something is asked of us that we cannot answer. I remember Roselyne's saying, long before there was war, one sunset, down by the sea in the south— "So much happiness would be needed to fill the b

26 minute read

Read Chapter

May 4th

Yet perhaps in this cruel year spring is less cruel. Not to be happy is, in this year, the inevitable thing. One is less lonely in each his own special lack of happiness. And each one may think he would be happy, perfectly, if only there were no war....

13 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital, Friday, May 5th

They have taken away all my little soldiers. I did not know at all. I came just as usual, and did not notice any unusual confusion. I heard much noise as I ran up the stairs, but there is always noise in the corridors. When I got to the top of the stairs, there was the last batch of them, in their patched faded old uniforms, with their crutches and bandages and their bundles, all packed into the lift that was just started down. I could not even see who they were. Some one called "Madame, oh, Mad

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital—Arrival, Saturday, 6th

They are very tired. They want to be let alone. They do not care what happens to them, or to the little queer odds and ends of things in their bundles. They were bathed in the admission room; Madame Marthe and Madame Alice were called there. Madame Madeline threw out their dirty torn clothes, and the boots of those who had boots, to Madame Bayle in the hall. Madame Bayle made Joseph take all that away, and gave me each man's own little things to put on the night table of his bed, his képi and hi

2 minute read

Read Chapter

The Chéchia, Monday, May 15th

I suppose because to-day the sunshine is happy, Charles, the little 11, who has been in his bed in the corner since the days of the Marne, has taken a fancy to have all his things got ready for him in case he wants to go out. He says that any day now he may be wanting to go out. He is of the ler Zouaves, and it is a red cap he must have, a chéchia. Nobody knows what became of his, it is so long since he had worn it. He never thought of it himself until to-day. But to-day he thinks of nothing els

59 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, May 29th

I went this afternoon to the Pré Catelan , for the first time in very long. I went in by the gate near the stone column. There were quite a lot of motors waiting at the gate; it did not look war as it did last year. Last year, in May, the gates were always almost shut, and when people came they had to push through. Last year the little park was very empty. We used to wander as we pleased across the lawns and gather primroses that grew for nobody. But now there were people in the paths; especiall

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Thursday, June 1st

Verdun, Verdun, Verdun. The great bells, that are not really bells, are still ringing and ringing. One hears them ringing through the streets of Paris, up and down, all night long. Out in the country they must be ringing, and ringing across all the fields and forests, and through the hills, and along all the roads and rivers, and to all the edges of the land. Even if they were dirges, tolling, they would yet always have been triumphant bells....

22 minute read

Read Chapter

The Queen: To her

A beautiful thing has happened in a beautiful hospital. Going to that hospital from mine, what seems most beautiful about it, and very strange, is its peace. It is so quiet. The little gentle nuns move softly and have sweet low voices. The women who work there are all of them women who choose to serve, and they serve lovingly. One feels there quietness and sympathy, and something that I think must be just the love of God. My hospital seems like a nightmare in that beautiful place. One day there

5 minute read

Read Chapter

Questions and Answers

The wounds in the road are kept filled up. As the road is wounded, every day, they fill the wounds up and smooth them over. Because, in case of an advance or a retreat, the way must be kept open and clear. This I have been told, for I cannot go to see. They tell me how the work of the fields goes on around the wounds of the fields. There is no need, of course, to tend the wounds of the fields. Sometimes in the ploughing the blade of the plough strikes against an unexploded shell that the grass h

1 minute read

Read Chapter

The Dead Town

They say that the grass is growing everywhere in the empty streets of the town. The streets are kept cleared of the ruins of the houses that fall into them, and their wounds are carefully healed, like the wounds of the road. The stones of the broken houses are piled up quite neatly at the edge of the streets. There is no glass left of the windows of those houses that still stand—except for that—unhurt. Many of the houses are terribly hurt, the roof gone, great gaps in the walls. I ask, do you se

1 minute read

Read Chapter

The Grass Road

You can keep on for a short distance beyond the town, on the other side of it. The great road leads on between its poplar trees, white and straight. Here it has been less wounded because the hills shelter it. The trees have not been hurt here; they lift their grey-green plumes, light and proud as ever, above the road. I remember to ask: Is there much passing along the road, that terrible grey passing of war things? Do you see many blue troops along the road? They say: Oh, yes, of course, as far

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Fifteen Days

Just before the end of the world they were together at the château. They thought it was to have been for the last time. There had been many things they needed to talk over and arrange together, and why not quietly. They were "done with passion, pain, and anger." They thought to bid one another good-bye when everything was arranged, wishing one another well, and go their different ways. There were no children, they were hurting no one. They had been hurting one another too long, for ten years—the

16 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital, Monday, June 12th

We never see them well. As soon as they are better at all they send them downstairs to the convalescent ward, and from there they are marked for other hospitals, and in a day or two, one morning, I come to find them gone. The men who were evacuated at the beginning of Verdun did not even make the halt of the ward downstairs. And now those first Verdun men are gone, all but the very worst of them, to make place for men from, we don't know where. The boy with the almond-shaped eyes is one of those

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Saturday, June 24th

The boy with the almond-shaped eyes is dead. He died day before yesterday. I have been ill and not at the hospital these days, and I did not know. I went back to the hospital only this afternoon. His father and mother arrived too late, this morning. They had had scarcely time to reach the farm in Normandy, when one of the house doctors, a kind man, wrote to tell them to come back. At the bureau they made a mistake in the address they gave the doctor, and his letter was returned to him in the pos

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Sunday, June 25th

I was going to the chapel with my flowers, but I met Madame Marthe in the archway of our court, and she told me it was not there that I would find him. We went together around behind the chapel and past buildings that I had never seen before, of the immense world of the hospital. What a dreadful world in this June sunshiny morning! A steep, dusty road goes up past outbuildings of the hospital, workshops, and yards, where there were some green things growing, and at the top there were a lot of ou

3 minute read

Read Chapter

The Stain

The maid, who had been Giselle's nurse so short a time ago, opened the library door and announced, unwillingly, one could see, "Madame la Marquise de St. Agnan, Madame la Comtesse." Giselle, in her heavy mourning, stood up from the chair by the window. She did not go forward to meet Paule. "It is sweet of you to see me," said Paule, crossing the room to her, slender and tall and lovely. The baby-boy and girl who had been playing with some wooden toy soldiers on the floor in a corner, both scramb

8 minute read

Read Chapter

From Verdun

He was grown so used to his mud-hole, and the straw, and the mushrooms, and rats, that when he was come into the salon of the house in the Parc Monceau, and the butler he never had seen before had closed the door behind him saying, in odd French, that he would go and tell Madame la Comtesse , he just stood there in the middle of the room and laughed. He stood there, just as he had come out of the trenches, a most disreputable figure that once had been blue, and laughed to think that it was to th

7 minute read

Read Chapter

Sunday, July 2nd

Last night Paris streets heard the cannon of the great prelude. The breeze, that was fresh and sweet from the country, brought in the sound of the cannon. In the silence of the night the streets listened. It was a sound regular and even. If Time were a great clock the sound of its ticking would be like that, on and on. If there were one great pulse that beat for all the life of the world, its throb would be like that, unceasing, relentless. It seemed like something that had always been, that alw

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, July 3rd

This is a dark day, the colour of battles, for battles are not of scarlet and gold, only dark. It is as if the darkness of the day and the darkness of the smoke of battle are terribly mingled together....

12 minute read

Read Chapter

Tuesday, July 4th

The people who went to that church were proud, they were very proud of him, he had died so beautifully. Each one of them was proud to say, "He was my friend," or "I knew his people," or "I saw him once," or just, "He was an American." He had died for an ideal they all had sight of. It was only a memorial service. There were only the two flags, the flag of France and the Stars and Stripes, in the aisle before the altar. He was lying somewhere inside the enemy lines, as he had fallen. They of the

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Invaded Town, Wednesday, July 5th

To-day I was shown a letter that came—I was not told by what means—from one of the invaded towns of the North. It was the letter of a girl who with her father kept an old book-shop in the Place de l'Eglise. It was written to her sister, married in Paris, from whom they had had no news since the war began, but to whom they had managed to get word through—I do not know how—once or twice. The letter, received only yesterday, was dated January 16. It told of a thing that had been vaguely rumoured he

5 minute read

Read Chapter

That Naughty Little Boy

It was that naughty little boy who was killed, to whose funeral she went this morning in the church of St. Augustin. That naughty little boy—grown up, wandered far, always a "bad case," come home because there was war, and gone out with the rest—is dead magnificently. He was shot down leading an attack upon the works of Thiaumont; they say his men would have followed him anywhere. Think of that naughty little boy, grown up to become a leader men were proud to follow unto death! He used to pull h

2 minute read

Read Chapter

Little Mild Gentleman

The little mild gentleman of teacups and cakes—so useful when there were people who simply had to be asked—always ready to fill a place, considerate of old ladies—of course, they did not want him at the Front. He had rather bad lungs, or something, and was shortsighted at that; it was absurd of him even to try to get out—no army doctor would pass him. After months and months of effort, he at last succeeded in getting himself taken on for ammunition work and the making of poison gases. Somebody m

45 minute read

Read Chapter

Gossip

Since his death she has been nursing in a typhus hospital, somewhere just behind the lines. It is now more than ten months. No one has seen her, scarcely any one has heard from her. Some people say that she is doing "wonderful work" and some people say that it is all pose, and some people say that she has an affair with the chief doctor of the hospital, or is it with the maire of the town? No one has seen her, but every one says she has lost her looks. She used to be very pretty, and a great fav

4 minute read

Read Chapter

Smoke

Suddenly, as the motor was passing the Place de la Concorde , Valérie said, "Would you mind if we just went home? I should like to go home." Of course Nanette could only say that she did not mind. Valérie had invited her to drive in the Bois and have tea at the little chalet of gaufres, by the gate of the Pré Catelan ; she had her mother's motor car for the afternoon, and they need not take anybody with them. Nanette had thought it would be such fun, just the two of them, without governesses or

11 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital, Saturday, July 8th

Some new ones are arrived from the Somme, only ten for my ward, the orderly told me at the gate. They were brought in at four o'clock this morning. The orderly, Hamond, said, "They are nothing so bad as the Verduns." When I came to the top of the stairs, Madame Marthe was in the corridor, waiting for Madame Bayle to come and unlock the linen-press. She looked very tired already, at the beginning of the day, and she was walking up and down between the stairs and the door of our ward, not able to

58 minute read

Read Chapter

Hospital, Sunday, July 9th

The man they trepanned yesterday will not keep still; he worries about everything. They say he is doing well, but he talks all the time. They told me to sit by him and try to make him stay quiet. At first he held my hand and seemed to rest, but he would not shut his eyes, and after a little he began to talk again. He was worried because he thought I had not enough to eat; he thought, because I was so thin, that I must be very poor. He said he had some biscuits and some rillettes de Tours done up

59 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, July 10th

All day long there has been sunshine, and the sky has been blue. There were great white clouds that mounted up over the city, and that one kept imagining was the smoke of battle. The blue of the sky was wonderful, infinite and near, like something of music or of religion, and the sunshine was like golden wine. But those soft white puffs of cloud were terrible. At the top of the Champs Elysées , behind the Arch, the clouds were driven up as if it were from the mouths of cannon. It must be just li

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Thursday, July 13th

People in the streets go slowly, looking up at the flags, and stopping to stand. They speak to one another wherever they happen to be standing together, and say that they hope to-morrow will be a fine day. The streets are getting ready for to-morrow, hanging out flags and streamers and garlands to the breeze that is strong to-day, and to the comings and goings of sunshine. Grey minutes and gold minutes follow one another across the city, where the flags of the different nations are blending thei

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Friday, July 14th: Pink Shoes

It would be too unkind of it to rain, as if the fête were not already shadowed enough. One was angry waking in the rain. It rained when they took their wreaths and flowers to the statues of Strasburg and Lille, and it rained when the troops were massed before the Invalides for the prise d'armes . But afterwards the rain did stop. A girl and a limping soldier, ahead of us as we went to the Nord-Sud , were sopping wet. I suppose they had been standing for hours on the Esplanade. Her knitted cape a

5 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, July 17th

Twenty-eight beds and ten stretcher-beds, the ward is full again. They are all from the Somme. They are not nearly so bad as those from Verdun and the Champagne. There has been only one of them, so far, who died. He was brought in on Wednesday, they operated next morning, and he died in the night. The wound had become gangrenous. He was twenty-five years old. He was from the invaded countries, and had no one, no one at all, who could come. He had had no news of his people since the beginning of

4 minute read

Read Chapter

Thursday, July 20th: Little Florist

Very early this morning, on my way to the hospital, I stopped at the little florist's shop round the corner, near the church, to get some blue and purple larkspur and crimson ramble-roses. It was so early, I was afraid Jeannette would not yet be back with the day's flowers from the great central markets. It is Jeannette, the younger, pretty sister, who goes every morning to choose the fresh flowers, and Caroline, who in the meanwhile puts the little shop in order to receive them, washing their w

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Trains

Two trains are side-tracked in the fields, beyond the little country station, where the wheat is already bronzed and heavy-headed, and the poppies flame through it, and where there is all the music of grasshoppers and crickets and birds. One is a train of men coming back from the Front on leave, and very gay. They are all laughing and singing in the carriages. They are all getting themselves tidied up, for shortly they will be in Paris. The officers in several of the carriages have managed to ge

1 minute read

Read Chapter

Monday, July 24th—5.30 of the morning

Pérot has just gone. He was noiselessly creeping down the outside stairs from his attic room. But I was waiting at the door on the landing, and made him come in for a minute to the apartment. He sat, loaded down with all his campaign things, in the little yellow chair, and I sat in the big yellow chair, and we looked at one another. It is odd how one never can say any of the things to them; and how, always, they understand perfectly all the things one would say if one could. He looked very ill,

3 minute read

Read Chapter

Wednesday, July 26th

This morning, at the hospital, one of the Verdun men came up from the convalescent ward downstairs, where he was sent when they evacuated for the Somme, to say good-bye to us. He is well enough, and he is going back. He is one of the older men, one of those who have the look of worrying about wives and babies. He has been twice wounded. The first was a bad wound; he had taken long to get over it in some hospital of the provinces, and to be able to go back and be wounded again. Now he is going ba

10 minute read

Read Chapter