Dorothy Canfield Fisher

“ Although many went out and were lighted again only once more to have the wind puff them into blackness, the number of lighted ones grew fabulously as the crowd assembled. The little yellow spots of life spread further and further, till around the foot of the huge inclined plane was an ocean of lights, heaving formlessly, with a futile, aimless motion like the sea, humanity lost in the darkness. ”

“ There is no need to repeat in detail here what has already been told of the first three months of her service—her arrival at the field hospital, disorganized, submerged by the terrible, ever-renewed flood of wounded men, of the astonishment of the doctor in charge. “What, a woman! This is no place for a woman. But, good God! if you know anything about surgery, roll up your sleeves and stay!”
There she stayed for three months, those blasting first three months of the war, when French people put forth undreamed-of strength to meet a crisis of undreamed-of horror. ”

“ Oh, André, it hurt! I was ashamed that I could be hurt so cruelly by anything but the war.”
This led to talk of America. “All our hope is with them, Jeanne. You mustn’t mind what one woman said—very likely a tired woman too, fretted by being in a country where she doesn’t speak the language. All the future is in their hands, and, by God, Jeanne, I begin to believe they realize it! They are really coming, you know; they are really here. I see them with my own eyes, not just doctors and nurses and engineers and telegraphists, as at first, but real fighting men. ”

“ I think there never can have been such a day before, such a day of pure thanksgiving and joy for every one. For the emotion was so intense that, during the priceless hours of that first day, it admitted no other. Human hearts could hold no more than that great gladness. The dreadful past, the terrible problems of the future, were not. We lived and drew our breath only in the knowledge that “firing had ceased at eleven o’clock that morning,” and that those who had fought as best they could for the Right had conquered. ”

“ Then one of the men whose wounds she dressed told her that he had been able to see the Eiffel Tower from where he fell. This sounded as though the next news could be nothing but the German entry into Paris.
All France throbbed with straining, despairing effort, far beyond its normal strength, during those first three months; and to do the man’s part she took, the delicate woman doctor, laboring incessantly among the bleeding wrecks of human bodies, needed all her will-power to pull her through. ”

“ Anything might have happened since the last news had come in from the outer world—anything, that is, except the end of the war. That alone had come to seem impossible.
And yet, in spite of that great flooding tide [6] of her expectancy, when the ring at the door finally came, it always gave Jeanne an instant’s violent shock. Her heart flared up like a torch with hope and fear, its reflection flickering on her thin cheeks as she hurried to the front of the house and, her delicate work-worn hands shaking, opened the door on Fate. ”

“ When the first tears of deliverance had passed, and your knees had stopped shaking, and your heart no longer beat suffocatingly in your throat, why, then every one felt one common imperious desire, to leave the little cramping prison of his own walls, to escape out of the selfish circle of his own joy, and to mingle his thanksgiving with that of all his fellows, to make himself physically, as he felt spiritually, at one with rejoicing humanity. ”

“ Then the wild period of fury and haste and nervous, emotional exaltation passed, and France faced another ordeal, harder for her temperament even than the first fierce onset of the unequal struggle—the long period of patient endurance of the unendurable. The miracle of the Marne had been wrought; Paris was saved; the sting and stimulant of immediate, deadly danger was past; the fatigue from the supernatural effort of those first months dimmed every eye, deadened all nerves. Then France tapped another reservoir of national strength and began patiently, constructively to “organize” the war. ”

“ People who met her in a social way knew her as an attractive woman with a well-proportioned figure, lovely hair, and clear brown eyes, whom one met once or twice a week at the theater or in the homes of mutual friends, and who enjoyed a hearty laugh and cheerful, chatting talk. Other people who saw her every morning in her laboratory garb, serious, intent, concentrated, knew her as one of those scientific investigators who can not rest while the horrible riddle of cancer is unsolved. ”

“ The war has produced no other book like ‘Professor Latimer’s Progress,’ with its sanative masculine blend of deep feeling, fluid intelligence, and heart-easing mirth, its people a joyous company. It is a spiritual adventure, the adventure of the American soul in search of a new foothold in a tottering world. ”

“ At such times Jeanne braced her shivering limbs and throbbing nerves to steady rigidity and bore her burden as though she had the strength of eternity in her heart. Scraps of phrases from André’s letters came before her eyes, as voices speak to tranced saints. As she worked she saw, written before her, “Whoever is responsible for the war, the children are not.” Or again, “We are all evil creatures, God knows, and our motives must be mixed in this war because they are mixed in everything else. ”

“ FRANCE’S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR
The American public has just heard of Dr. Nicole Girard-Mangin, the woman doctor who was mobilized and sent to the front by mistake, and who proved herself so fearless and useful that she was kept there for two years amid bursting shells and rattling mitrailleuses. She is being cited spectacularly as a dramatic proof that women can take men’s parts, and do men’s work, and know the man’s joy of being useful. But she is much more than a woman doing a man’s work. ”

“ Can you imagine the condition of a man with typhoid fever, who has lain in a trench in the mud for four days, with no shelter from the rain or snow but an overcoat spread over him, with no care beyond an occasional drink of water from a comrade’s flask? ”

“ It made an intolerable trial of every smallest process of the everyday life, to prepare food, and eat it, and play, and wash, and study, and bathe the children, and dress and undress them—they were like pigs in a sty, she often thought, working feverishly to keep a little order and decency in the room which seemed to her fastidious senses to reek stiflingly of the effluvia of too-concentrated human life. ”

“ Jeanne told of her anxieties about Michel, the oldest, who had silent, morose fits of brooding. “He’s old enough to feel it all. The littler ones only suffer physically.” André put his father’s hand on the sleeping boy’s forehead and looked down at him silently, the deep look of strength and comprehension which was like the wine of life to his wife. She thought it was a benediction to the boy which no priest could better. André took his watch out of his pocket and laid it on the table. ”

“ Last of all I saw a strong young man whose light had been extinguished, holding out his lifeless candle to that of an old, poor, bent woman who, patiently, patiently, offered him her tiny, living flame. ”

“ Friends knew her as the gently bred woman who, although driven by no material necessity, renounced the easy, sheltered, comfortable life of the home-keeping woman for an incessant, beneficent activity, the well-ordered regularity of which alone kept it from breaking down her none too robust health. ”

“ By June of the next year you would have found, if you had had the courage to go within two kilometers of the front line, a very well-appointed contagious ward of a military hospital, where nothing was lacking for the men’s comfort—except a certainty that the whole thing might not be blown to pieces by a shell. And by the end of 1915, when there began to be talk of a great German drive against Verdun, the men under our doctor’s supervision had as good care as they could have had anywhere, with laboratory and sterilizing facilities—everything. ”

“ Of all the hundreds of thousands of women who heard those guns, I think there was not one who did not feel instantly, scalding on her cheeks, the blessed tears—tears of joy! She had forgotten that there could be tears of joy. The horrible weight on the soul that had grown to be a part of life dissolved away in that assuaging flood ”

“ I wondered for just an instant if there could be any military regulation, forbidding our soldiers to enter the church; and even as I wondered, the door opened and a boy in khaki stepped in—one out of all those hordes. He crossed himself, took a rosary out of his pocket, knelt, and began his prayers.
Thirty-thousand soldiers were in that town that day. Whatever else we are, I reflected, we are not a people of mystics. ”

“ No evil epithets hurled at the defeated enemy, not one, not one in all those long hours of shouting out what was in the heart; no ugly effigies, no taunting cries, no mention even of the enemy—instead a fresh outburst of rejoicing at the encounter with a long procession of Belgians, marching arm in arm, carrying Belgian flags and pealing out like trumpets the noble Brabançonne! ”

“ I tore a fly-leaf out of a book lying in the heap of rubbish before the ruins of a bombarded house (it was a treatise on Bach’s chorales by the French organist Widor!) and wrote, “These are two brave old people, inhabitants of Villers-de-Petit, who wish to go back there to work under shell-fire to save what they can of their own and their neighbors’ crops. Theirs is the spirit that is keeping France alive.”
“It probably won’t do you a bit of good,” I said, “but there it is for what it is worth.”
“Oh, once the American soldiers know what we want, they will let us pass, we know.” ”

“ Each one called up in himself all the reserve strength his life had given him and, tight-lipped, clung as best he could to self-control.
The first nerves to give way were in the bakeshop. The bakers suddenly burst out of their overheated cell and, half-naked in that sharp cold, clad only in their white-linen aprons and trousers, fled away, anywhere, away, out of that hell. One of the doctors, seeing this beginning of the panic, shouted out in an angry attempt to stem the tide of fear, “Shame on you, men! What are you doing! What would happen if every one ran away!” ”

“ The tears were streaming down the faces of many of the women in the crowd. The little boy’s mother sobbed loudly, and prayed with all her might.
The march past of the innumerable men, the incessant flickering passage of their pale-yellow lights, the never-ending procession of their pale, anxious faces, became an obsession. It seemed that every one, everywhere in the world, was [96] marching together, singing and praying, hoping against hope for a miracle. ”

“ Sometimes there walked beside these soldiers working women with sleeping babies in their arms, sometimes old men in frock coats with ribbons in their buttonholes, sometimes light-hearted, laughing little munition workers still in their black aprons, but with tricolored ribbons twisted in their hair, sometimes elegantly dressed ladies, sometimes women in long mourning veils, sometimes ragged old beggars, sometimes a cab filled with crippled soldiers waving their crutches—but all with the same face of steadfast, glowing jubilee. ”

“ Even then she weeds out rigorously, in the middle of the short, intensive, concentrated course, those who do not show the necessary physical, mental, and moral [87] qualities to fit them for the grave responsibilities they will have at the front, for nurses from this hospital go out to direct and run the field hospitals, not merely to be nurses there.
The work for the doctor at the head is a “grind,” nothing less, monotonous, like all teaching—an ever-reiterated repetition of the same thing—no glory, no change, no bright face of danger. ”

“ Then a faint murmur came up through the rain and darkness. Speaking voices are not heard far, but voices raised in song have wings. The crowd was beginning to sing.
It was also beginning to take shape. From the foot of the inclined plane out into the black esplanade, streamed two long files of light, purposeful, with the sharp, forward-piercing line of the arrow. The procession was beginning to form.
The murmur rose into a chant as the crowd, hearing the first notes, took it up, singing as they [100] fell into line. ”

“ Any one who saw all that afternoon those thousands and thousands of human faces all shining with the same exaltation can never entirely despair of his fellows again, knowing them to be capable of that pure joy. ”

“ Are you really an American woman?” he said incredulously, his young face lighting up as though he saw a member of his own family. “I haven’t talked to one in so long! Why yes, I like France fine. It’s the loveliest country to look at, isn’t it? I didn’t know any country could be kept up so, like a garden. How do they do it without any men left? They must be awfully fine people. I wish I could talk to them some.”
“Who are these soldiers going through to-day?” I asked. “Are they going out to the front line trenches, or coming back? ”

“ There deep answered deep; he brought to her the envenomed hatred of war which fills the trenches to the brim. “It is not glorious; it is infamous. I am not a hero; I am a murderer. But there are worse things. It would be worse to have peace, with the German ideas ruling the world. No, every one of us would better die than allow that to happen. ”