A Volunteer Poilu | Page 9

cut down were still
visible, and from a railroad tie embedded in the sidewalk hung six links
of a massive chain. Through this forgotten flotsam on the great shore of
the war, the quiet crowds went in and out of the Maillot entrance to the
Bois de Boulogne. There was a sense of order and security in the air. I
took a seat on the terrace of a little restaurant. The garçon was a small
man in the fifties, inclined to corpulence, with a large head, large,
blue-gray eyes, purplish lips, and blue-black hair cut pompadour. As
we watched the orderly, Sunday crowds going to the great park, we fell

into conversation about the calmness of Paris. "Yes, it is calm," he said;
"we are all waiting (nous attendons). We know that the victory will be
ours at the finish. But all we can do is to wait. I have two sons at the
front." He had struck the keynote. Paris is calmly waiting--waiting for
the end of the war, for victory, for the return of her children.
Yet in this great, calm city, with its vaporous browns and slaty blues,
and its characteristic acrid smell of gasoline fumes, was another Paris, a
terrible Paris, which I was that night to see. Early in the afternoon a
dull haze of leaden clouds rose in the southwest. It began to rain.
In a great garret of the hospital, under a high French roof, was the
dormitory of the volunteers attached to the Paris Ambulance Section.
At night, this great space was lit by only one light, a battered electric
reading-lamp standing on a kind of laboratory table in the center of the
floor, and window curtains of dark-blue cambric, waving mysteriously
in the night wind, were supposed to hide even this glimmer from the
eyes of raiding Zeppelins. Looking down, early in the evening, into the
great quadrangle of the institution, one saw the windows of the
opposite wing veiled with this mysterious blue, and heard all the
feverish unrest of a hospital, the steps on the tiled corridors, the running
of water in the bathroom taps, the hard clatter of surgical vessels, and
sometimes the cry of a patient having a painful wound dressed. But late
at night the confused murmur of the battle between life and death had
subsided, the lights in the wards were extinguished, and only the candle
of the night nurse, seen behind a screen, and the stertorous breathing of
the many sleepers, brought back the consciousness of human life. I
have often looked into the wards as I returned from night calls to the
station where we received the wounded, and been conscious, as I
peered silently into that flickering obscurity, of the vague unrest of
sleepers, of the various attitudes assumed, the arms outstretched, the
upturned throats, and felt, too, in the still room, the mystic presence of
the Angel of Pain.
It was late at night, and I stood looking out of my window over the
roofs of Neuilly to the great, darkened city just beyond. From
somewhere along the tracks of the "Little Belt" railway came a series of
piercing shrieks from a locomotive whistle. It was raining hard,
drumming on the slate roof of the dormitory, and somewhere below a
gutter gurgled foolishly. Far away in the corridor a gleam of yellow

light shone from the open door of an isolation room where a nurse was
watching by a patient dying of gangrene. Two comrades who had been
to the movies at the Gaumont Palace near the Place Clichy began to
talk in sibilant whispers of the evening's entertainment, and one of them
said, "That war film was a corker; did you spot the big cuss throwing
the grenades?" "Yuh, damn good," answered the other pulling his shirt
over his head. It was a strange crew that inhabited these quarters; there
were idealists, dreamers, men out of work, simple rascals and
adventurers of all kinds. To my right slept a big, young Westerner,
from some totally unknown college in Idaho, who was a humanitarian
enthusiast to the point of imbecility, and to the left a middle-aged rogue
who indulged in secret debauches of alcohol and water he cajoled from
the hospital orderlies. Yet this obscure and motley community was
America's contribution to France. I fell asleep.
"Up, birds!"
The lieutenant of the Paris Section, a mining engineer with a
picturesque vocabulary of Nevadan profanity, was standing in his
pajama trousers at the head of the room, holding a lantern in his hand.
"Up, birds!" he called again. "Call's come in for Lah Chapelle." There
were uneasy movements under the blankets, inmates of adjoining beds
began to talk to each other, and some lit their bedside candles. The
chief went down both sides of