The Living Present | Page 7

woman of the village close by, I wondered
with some apprehension if she were meaning to reward us for our
excessive virtue. But they were an impromptu treat for the soldiers
standing in the yard--some already lined up to march--and the way they
disappeared down those brown throats made me feel blasée and
over-civilized.
I did not hand out during this little fête, my place being taken by Mrs.
Thayer of Boston, so I was better able to appreciate the picture. All the
women were pretty, and I wondered if Madame Balli had chosen them
as much for their esthetic appeal to the exacting French mind as for
their willingness to help. It was a strange sight, that line of charming
women with kind bright eyes, and, although simply dressed, stamped
with the world they moved in, while standing and lying about were the
tired and dirty poilus--even those that stood were slouching as if resting
their backs while they could--with their uniforms of horizon blue faded
to an ugly gray, streaked and patched. They had not seen a decent
woman for months, possibly not a woman at all, and it was no wonder
they followed every movement of these smiling benefactresses with
wondering, adoring, or cynical eyes.
But, I repeat, to me it was an ill-favored scene, and the fact that it was a
warm and peaceful day, with a radiant blue sky above, merely added to
the irony. Although later I visited the War Zone three times and saw
towns crowded with soldiers off duty, or as empty as old gray shells,
nothing induced in me the same vicious stab of hatred for war as this
scene. There is only one thing more abominable than war and that is the
pacificist doctrine of non-resistance when duty and honor call. Every
country, no doubt, has its putrescent spots caused by premature senility,
but no country so far has shown itself as wholly crumbling in an age

where the world is still young.
V
A few days later I went with Madame Balli and Mr. Holman-Black to
the military hospital, Chaptal, devoted to the men whose faces had been
mutilated. The first room was an immense apartment with an open
space beyond the beds filled to-day with men who crowded about
Madame Balli, as much to get that personal word and smile from her,
which the French soldier so pathetically places above all gifts, as to
have the first choice of a pipe or knife.
After I had distributed the usual little presents of cigarettes, chocolate,
soap, and post-cards among the few still in bed, I sat on the outside of
Madame Balli's mob and talked to one of the infirmières. She was a
Frenchwoman married to an Irishman who was serving in the British
navy, and her sons were in the trenches. She made a remark to me that I
was destined to hear very often:
"Oh, yes, we work hard, and we are only too glad to do what we can for
France; but, my God! what would become of us if we remained idle
and let our minds dwell upon our men at the Front? We should go mad.
As it is, we are so tired at night that we sleep, and the moment we
awaken we are on duty again. I can assure you the harder we have to
work the more grateful we are."
She looked very young and pretty in her infirmière uniform of white
linen with a veil of the same stiff material and the red cross on her
breast, and it was odd to hear that sons of hers were in the trenches.
After that nearly all the men in the different wards we visited were in
bed, and each room was worse than the last, until it was almost a relief
to come to the one where the men had just been operated on and were
so bandaged that any features they may have had left were
indistinguishable.
For the uncovered faces were horrible. I was ill all night, not only from
the memory of the sickening sights with which I had remained several

hours in a certain intimacy--for I went to assist Madame Balli and took
the little gifts to every bedside--but from rage against the devilish
powers that unloosed this horror upon the world. One of the grim
ironies of this war is that the Hohenzollerns and the junkers are so
constituted mentally that they never will be haunted with awful visions
like those that visited the more plastic conscience of Charles IX after St.
Bartholomew; but at least it will be some compensation to picture them
rending the air with lamentations over their own downfall and hurling
curses at their childish folly.
It is the bursting of shrapnel that causes