It was from a small operating hospital in a village of the Argonne that she first saw the war with her own eyes.  
Her father had wished her to go.  Arthur’s death had stirred in him the old Puritan blood with its record of long battle for liberty of conscience.  If war claimed to be master of a man’s soul, then the new warfare¹ must be against war.  He remembered the saying of a Frenchwoman who had been through the Franco-Prussian war.  Joan, on her return from Paris some years before, had told him of her, repeating her words: “But, of course, it would not do to tell the truth,” the old lady had said, “or we should have our children growing up to hate war.”
 
“I’ll be lonely and anxious till you come back,” he said.  “But that will have to be my part of the fight.”
 
She had written to Folk.  No female nurses were supposed to be allowed within the battle zone; but under pressure of shortage the French staff were relaxing the rule, and Folk had pledged himself to her discretion².  “I am not doing you any kindness,” he had written.  “You will have to share the common hardships and privations, and the danger is real.  If I didn’t feel instinctively³ that underneath⁴ your mask of sweet reasonableness you are one of the most obstinate⁵ young women God ever made, and that without me you would probably get yourself into a still worse hole, I’d have refused.”  And then followed a list of the things she was to be sure to take with her, including a pound or two of Keating’s insect powder, and a hint that it might save her trouble, if she had her hair cut short.
 
There was but one other woman at the hospital.  It had been a farmhouse⁶.  The man and both sons had been killed during the first year of the war, and the woman had asked to be allowed to stay on.  Her name was Madame Lelanne.  She was useful by reason of her great physical strength.  She could take up a man as he lay and carry him on her outstretched arms.  It was an expressionless face, with dull, slow-moving eyes that never changed.  She and Joan shared a small grenier in one of the barns.  Joan had brought with her a camp bedstead; but the woman, wrapping a blanket round her, would creep into a hole she had made for herself among the hay.  She never took off her clothes, except the great wooden-soled boots, so far as Joan could discover.
 
The medical staff consisted of a Dr. Poujoulet and two assistants.  The authorities were always promising⁷ to send him more help, but it never arrived.  One of the assistants, a Monsieur Dubos, a little man with a remarkably⁸ big beard, was a chemist, who, at the outbreak of the war, had been on the verge⁹, as he made sure, of an important discovery in connection with colour photography.  Almost the first question he asked Joan was could she speak German.  Finding that she could, he had hurried her across the yard into a small hut where patients who had borne their operation successfully awaited their turn to be moved down to one of the convalescent hospitals at the base.  Among them was a German prisoner, an elderly man, belonging to the Landwehr; in private life a photographer.  He also had been making experiments in the direction of colour photography.  Chance had revealed to the two men their common interest, and they had been exchanging notes.  The German talked a little French, but not sufficient; and on the day of Joan’s arrival they had reached an impasse¹⁰ that was maddening to both of them.  Joan found herself up against technical terms that rendered her task difficult, but fortunately had brought a dictionary with her, and was able to make them understand one another.  But she had to be firm with both of them, allowing them only ten minutes together at a time.  The little Frenchman would kneel by the bedside, holding the German at an angle where he could talk with least danger to his wound.  It seemed that each was the very man the other had been waiting all his life to meet.  They shed tears on one another’s neck when they parted, making all arrangements to write to one another.
 
“And you will come and stay with me,” persisted the little Frenchman, “when this affair is finished”—he made an impatient gesture with his hands.  “My wife takes much interest.  She will be delighted.”
 
And the big German, again embracing the little Frenchman, had promised, and had sent his compliments to Madame.
 
The other was a young priest.  He wore the regulation Red Cross uniform, but kept his cassock hanging on a peg¹¹ behind his bed.  He had pretty frequent occasion to take it down.  These small emergency hospitals, within range of the guns, were reserved for only dangerous cases: men whose wounds would not permit of their being carried further; and there never was much more than a sporting chance of saving them.  They were always glad to find there was a priest among the staff.  Often it was the first question they would ask on being lifted out of the ambulance.  Even those who professed¹² to no religion seemed comforted by the idea.  He went by the title of “Monsieur le Prêtre:” Joan never learned his name.  It was he who had laid out the little cemetery¹³ on the opposite side of the village street.  It had once been an orchard¹⁴, and some of the trees were still standing¹⁵.  In the centre, rising out of a pile of rockwork, he had placed a crucifix that had been found upon the roadside and had surrounded it with flowers.  It formed the one bright spot of colour in the village; and at night time, when all other sounds were hushed, the iron wreaths upon its little crosses, swaying against one another in the wind, would make a low, clear, tinkling¹⁷ music.  Joan would sometimes lie awake listening to it.  In some way she could not explain it always brought the thought of children to her mind.
 
The doctor himself was a broad-shouldered, bullet-headed man, clean shaven, with close-cropped, bristly hair.  He had curiously¹⁸ square hands, with short, squat¹⁹ fingers.  He had been head surgeon in one of the Paris hospitals, and had been assigned his present post because of his marvellous quickness with the knife.  The hospital was the nearest to a hill of great strategical importance, and the fighting in the neighbourhood was almost continuous.  Often a single ambulance would bring in three or four cases, each one demanding instant attention.  Dr. Poujoulet, with his hairy arms bare to the shoulder, would polish them off one after another, with hardly a moment’s rest between, not allowing time even for the washing of the table.  Joan would have to summon all her nerve to keep herself from collapsing²¹.  At times the need for haste was such that it was impossible to wait for the anaesthetic to take effect.  The one redeeming²² feature was the extraordinary heroism²³ of the men, though occasionally there was nothing for it but to call in the orderlies to hold some poor fellow down, and to deafen²⁴ one’s ears.
 
One day, after a successful operation, she was tending a young sergeant²⁵.  He was a well-built, handsome man, with skin as white as a woman’s.  He watched her with curious indifference²⁶ in his eyes as she busied herself, trying to make him comfortable, and did nothing to help her.
 
“Has Mam’selle ever seen a bull fight?” he asked her.
 
“No,” she answered.  “I’ve seen all the horror and cruelty I want to for the rest of my life.”
 
“Ah,” he said, “you would understand if you had.  When one of the horses goes down gored²⁸, his entrails lying out upon the sand, you know what they do, don’t you?  They put a rope round him, and drag him, groaning²⁹, into the shambles³⁰ behind.  And once there, kind people like you and Monsieur le Médecin tend him and wash him, and put his entrails back, and sew him up again.  He thinks it so kind of them—the first time.  But the second!  He understands.  He will be sent back into the arena³¹ to be ripped up again, and again after that.  This is the third time I have been wounded, and as soon as you’ve all patched me up and I’ve got my breath again, they’ll send me back into it.  Mam’selle will forgive my not feeling grateful to her.”  He gave a short laugh that brought the blood into his mouth.
 
The village consisted of one long straggling street, following the course of a small stream between two lines of hills.  It was on one of the great lines of communication: and troops and war material passed through it, going and coming, in almost endless procession.  It served also as a camp of rest.  Companies from the trenches³² would arrive there, generally towards the evening, weary, listless, dull-eyed, many of them staggering like over-driven cattle beneath their mass of burdens.  They would fling their accoutrements from them and stand in silent groups till the sergeants³⁴ and corporals returned to lead them to the barns and out-houses that had been assigned to them, the houses still habitable being mostly reserved for the officers.  Like those of most French villages, they were drab, plaster-covered buildings without gardens; but some of them were covered with vines, hiding their ugliness; and the village as a whole, with its groups, here and there, of fine sycamore trees and its great stone fountain in the centre, was picturesque³⁵ enough.  It had twice changed hands, and a part of it was in ruins.  From one or two of the more solidly built houses merely the front had fallen, leaving the rooms just as they had always been: the furniture in its accustomed place, the pictures on the walls.  They suggested doll’s houses standing open.  One wondered when the giant child would come along and close them up.  The iron spire³⁷ of the little church had been hit twice.  It stood above the village, twisted into the form of a note of interrogation.  In the churchyard many of the graves had been ripped open.  Bones and skulls³⁸ lay scattered³⁹ about among the shattered tombstones.  But, save for a couple of holes in the roof, the body was still intact, and every afternoon a faint, timid-sounding bell called a few villagers and a sprinkling of soldiers to Mass.  Most of the inhabitants had fled, but the farmers and shopkeepers had remained.  At intervals⁴⁰, the German batteries, searching round with apparent aimlessness, would drop a score or so of shells about the neighbourhood; but the peasant, with an indifference that was almost animal, would still follow his ox-drawn⁴¹ plough; the old, bent⁴² crone, muttering curses, still ply⁴³ the hoe.  The proprietors⁴⁴ of the tiny épiceries must have been rapidly making their fortunes, considering the prices that they charged the unfortunate poilu, dreaming of some small luxury out of his five sous a day.  But as one of them, a stout⁴⁵, smiling lady, explained to Joan, with a gesture: “It is not often that one has a war.”
 
Joan had gone out in September, and for a while the weather was pleasant.  The men, wrapped up in their great-coats, would sleep for preference under the great sycamore trees.  Through open doorways⁴⁶ she would catch glimpses of picturesque groups of eager card-players, crowded round a flickering⁴⁷ candle.  From the darkness there would steal the sound of flute⁴⁸ or zither, of voices singing.  Occasionally it would be some strident ditty of the Paris music-halls, but more often it was sad and plaintive⁴⁹.  But early in October the rains commenced and the stream became a roaring torrent⁵⁰, and a clammy mist lay like a white river between the wooded hills.
 
Mud! that seemed to be the one word with which to describe modern war.  Mud everywhere!  Mud ankle-deep upon the roads; mud into which you sank up to your knees the moment you stepped off it; tents and huts to which you waded⁵¹ through the mud, avoiding the slimy gangways on which you slipped and fell; mud-bespattered men, mud-bespattered horses, little donkeys, looking as if they had been sculptured out of mud, struggling up and down the light railways that every now and then would disappear and be lost beneath the mud; guns and wagons⁵³ groaning through the mud; lorries and ambulances, that in the darkness had swerved⁵⁴ from the straight course, overturned and lying abandoned in the mud, motor-cyclists ploughing swift furrows⁵⁵ through the mud, rolling it back in liquid streams each side of them; staff cars rushing screaming through the mud, followed by a rushing fountain of mud; serried⁵⁶ ranks of muddy men stamping through the mud with steady rhythm, moving through a rain of mud, rising upward from the ground; long lines of motor-buses filled with a mass of muddy humanity packed shoulder to shoulder, rumbling⁵⁷ ever through the endless mud.
 
Men sitting by the roadside in the mud, gnawing⁵⁸ at unsavoury food; men squatting⁵⁹ by the ditches, examining their sores, washing their bleeding feet in the muddy water, replacing the muddy rags about their wounds.
 
A world without colour.  No other colour to be seen beneath the sky but mud.  The very buttons on the men’s coats painted to make them look like mud.
 
Mud and dirt!  Dirty faces, dirty hands, dirty clothes, dirty food, dirty beds; dirty interiors, from which there was never time to wash the mud; dirty linen⁶⁰ hanging up to dry, beneath which dirty children played, while dirty women scolded.  Filth⁶¹ and desolation all around.  Shattered farmsteads half buried in the mud; shattered gardens trampled⁶² into mud.  A weary land of foulness⁶³, breeding foulness; tangled⁶⁴ wire the only harvest of the fields; mile after mile of gaping⁶⁵ holes, filled with muddy water; stinking⁶⁶ carcases of dead horses; birds of prey⁶⁷ clinging to broken fences, flapping their great wings.
 
A land where man died, and vermin increased and multiplied.  Vermin on your body, vermin in your head, vermin in your food, vermin waiting for you in your bed; vermin the only thing that throve, the only thing that looked at you with bright eyes; vermin the only thing to which the joy of life had still been left.
 
Joan had found a liking⁶⁸ gradually growing up in her for the quick-moving, curt-tongued doctor.  She had dismissed him at first as a mere³⁶ butcher: his brutal⁶⁹ haste, his indifference apparently⁷⁰ to the suffering he was causing, his great, strong, hairy hands, with their squat fingers, his cold grey eyes.  But she learnt as time went by, that his callousness⁷¹ was a thing that he put on at the same time that he tied his white apron⁷² round his waist, and rolled up his sleeves.
 
She was resting, after a morning of grim work, on a bench outside the hospital, struggling with clenched⁷³, quivering hands against a craving⁷⁴ to fling herself upon the ground and sob⁷⁵.  And he had found her there; and had sat down beside her.
 
“So you wanted to see it with your own eyes,” he said.  He laid his hand upon her shoulder, and she had some difficulty in not catching⁷⁶ hold of him and clinging to him.  She was feeling absurdly womanish just at that moment.
 
“Yes,” she answered.  “And I’m glad that I did it,” she added, defiantly⁷⁷.
 
“So am I,” he said.  “Tell your children what you have seen.  Tell other women.”
 
“It’s you women that make war,” he continued.  “Oh, I don’t mean that you do it on purpose, but it’s in your blood.  It comes from the days when to live it was needful to kill.  When a man who was swift and strong to kill was the only thing that could save a woman and her brood.  Every other man that crept towards them through the grass was an enemy, and her only hope was that her man might kill him, while she watched and waited.  And later came the tribe; and instead of the one man creeping through the grass, the everlasting⁷⁸ warfare was against all other tribes.  So you loved only the men ever ready and willing to fight, lest you and your children should be carried into slavery: then it was the only way.  You brought up your boys to be fighters.  You told them stories of their gallant⁷⁹ sires.  You sang to them the songs of battle: the glory of killing⁸⁰ and of conquering.  You have never unlearnt the lesson.  Man has learnt comradeship—would have travelled further but for you.  But woman is still primitive⁸¹.  She would still have her man the hater and the killer⁸².  To the woman the world has never changed.”
 
“Tell the other women,” he said.  “Open their eyes.  Tell them of their sons that you have seen dead and dying in the foolish quarrel for which there was no need.  Tell them of the foulness, of the cruelty, of the senselessness of it all.  Set the women against War.  That is the only way to end it.”
 
It was a morning or two later that, knocking at the door of her loft⁸³, he asked her if she would care to come with him to the trenches.  He had brought an outfit⁸⁴ for her which he handed to her with a grin.  She had followed Folk’s advice and had cut her hair; and when she appeared before him for inspection⁸⁵ in trousers and overcoat, the collar turned up about her neck, and reaching to her helmet, he had laughingly pronounced the experiment safe.
 
A motor carried them to where the road ended, and from there, a little one-horse ambulance took them on to almost the last trees of the forest.  There was no life to be seen anywhere.  During the last mile, they had passed through a continuous double line of graves; here and there a group of tiny crosses keeping one another company; others standing singly, looking strangely lonesome amid the torn-up earth and shattered trees.  But even these had ceased.  Death itself seemed to have been frightened away from this terror-haunted desert.
 
Looking down, she could see thin wreaths of smoke, rising from the ground.  From underneath her feet there came a low, faint, ceaseless murmur⁸⁶.
 
“Quick,” said the doctor.  He pushed her in front of him, and she almost fell down a flight of mud-covered steps that led into the earth.  She found herself in a long, low gallery, lighted by a dim oil lamp, suspended from the blackened roof.  A shelf ran along one side of it, covered with straw.  Three men lay there.  The straw was soaked with their blood.  They had been brought in the night before by the stretcher-bearers.  A young surgeon was rearranging their splints and bandages, and redressing⁸⁷ their wounds.  They would lie there for another hour or so, and then start for their twenty kilometre drive over shell-ridden roads to one or another of the great hospitals at the base.  While she was there, two more cases were brought in.  The doctor gave but a glance at the first one and then made a sign; and the bearers passed on with him to the further end of the gallery.  He seemed to understand, for he gave a low, despairing cry and the tears sprang to his eyes.  He was but a boy.  The other had a foot torn off.  One of the orderlies gave him two round pieces of wood to hold in his hands while the young surgeon cut away the hanging flesh and bound up the stump⁸⁹.
 
The doctor had been whispering to one of the bearers.  He had the face of an old man, but his shoulders were broad and he looked sturdy.  He nodded, and beckoned⁹⁰ Joan to follow him up the slippery steps.
 
“It is breakfast time,” he explained, as they emerged into the air.  “We leave each other alone for half an hour—even the snipers.  But we must be careful.”  She followed in his footsteps, stooping so low that her hands could have touched the ground.  They had to be sure that they did not step off the narrow track marked with white stones, lest they should be drowned in the mud.  They passed the head of a dead horse.  It looked as if it had been cut off and laid there; the body was below it in the mud.
 
They spoke⁹¹ in whispers, and Joan at first had made an effort to disguise her voice.  But her conductor had smiled.  “They shall be called the brothers and the sisters of the Lord,” he had said.  “Mademoiselle is brave for her Brothers’ sake.”  He was a priest.  There were many priests among the stretcher-bearers.
 
Crouching⁹² close to the ground, behind the spreading roots of a giant oak, she raised her eyes.  Before her lay a sea of smooth, soft mud nearly a mile wide.  From the centre rose a solitary⁹³ tree, from which all had been shot away but two bare branches like outstretched arms above the silence.  Beyond, the hills rose again.  There was something unearthly in the silence that seemed to brood above that sea of mud.  The old priest told her of the living men, French and German, who had stood there day and night sunk in it up to their waists, screaming hour after hour, and waving their arms, sinking into it lower and lower, none able to help them: until at last only their screaming heads were left, and after a time these, too, would disappear: and the silence come again.
 
She saw the ditches, like long graves dug for the living, where the weary, listless men stood knee-deep in mud, hoping for wounds that would relieve them from the ghastly monotony of their existence; the holes of muddy water where the dead things lay, to which they crept out in the night to wash a little of the filth from their clammy bodies and their stinking clothes; the holes dug out of the mud in which they ate and slept and lived year after year: till brain and heart and soul seemed to have died out of them, and they remembered with an effort that they once were men.
 
* * * * *
 
After a time, the care of the convalescents passed almost entirely⁹⁴ into Joan’s hands, Madame Lelanne being told off to assist her.  By dint⁹⁵ of much persistence⁹⁶ she had succeeded in getting the leaky roof repaired, and in place of the smoky stove that had long been her despair she had one night procured⁹⁷ a fine calorifère by the simple process of stealing it.  Madame Lelanne had heard about it from the gossips.  It had been brought to a lonely house at the end of the village by a major of engineers.  He had returned to the trenches the day before, and the place for the time being was empty.  The thieves were never discovered.  The sentry⁹⁸ was positive that no one had passed him but two women, one of them carrying a baby.  Madame Lelanne had dressed it up in a child’s cloak and hood²⁰, and had carried it in her arms.  As it must have weighed nearly a couple of hundred-weight suspicion had not attached to them.
 
Space did not allow of any separation; broken Frenchmen and broken Germans would often lie side by side.  Joan would wonder, with a grim smile to herself, what the patriotic⁹⁹ Press of the different countries would have thought had they been there to have overheard the conversations.  Neither France nor Germany appeared to be the enemy, but a thing called “They,” a mysterious power that worked its will upon them both from a place they always spoke of as “Back there.”  One day the talk fell on courage.  A young French soldier was holding forth¹⁰⁰ when Joan entered the hut.
 
“It makes me laugh,” he was saying, “all this newspaper talk.  Every nation, proper............