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After making my thanksgiving, still standing on the other side, I blessed the objects myself strictly against all rules, I imagine and came home to breakfast; and before nine we were on our way. We were all silent as we progressed slowly and carefully through the crowded streets, seeing once more the patient brancardiers and the pitiful litters on their way to the piscines.
The brancardiers carried me down to Verdun, at night, I suppose, but I was unconscious; and so to the hospital at Vaudelaincourt. There were days and nights of blankness mixed with pain. Then I came to my senses and had rest. It was wonderful. I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. Would God it had been so! Then I should have been with my lieutenant.
Then, as the fight seemed over, the door was opened and we emerged. The Place had been evacuated by the mob, and was held by the troops. Fresh regiments were marching on it along the quay and the Rue de Rivoli. Wounded people were lying about or crawling towards the houses. Soon some brancardiers arrived and picked up the wounded.
My brain was amazingly clear. It registered every trifling impression. I wish it might always be so intensely awake and active. There seemed to be four of us in the dugout; the two brancardiers, and this second self of mine, as curious as an eavesdropper at a keyhole, listening intently to everything, and then turning to whisper to me.
It is a first-line ambulance corps, the boys who drive their little Ford ambulances right down to the battlefields and receive the wounded from the brancardiers, and who have seen the worst of Verdun, and endured the privations and the cold with the army.
From every corner came gusts of singing; and here and there through the crowd already moved the brancardiers men of every nation with shoulder-straps and cross bearing the litters with their piteous burdens. I was to say Mass in the crypt; and when I arrived there at last, the church was full from end to end. The interior was not so disappointing as I had feared.
"Oh, the facts are established a hundred times over the facts, I mean, that cures take place here which are not even approached in mental laboratories. But " He was interrupted by a sudden movement of the brancardiers. "See, they're removing her," he said. "Now, what'll you do, Monsignor? Will you go down to the grotto, or would you sooner watch a few more cases?"
The great rush of wounded had begun. Every few minutes the ambulances slopped down a miry byway, and turned in the gates; tired, putty-faced hospital attendants took out the stretchers and the nouveaux clients; mussy bundles of blue rags and bloody blankets turned into human beings; an overworked, nervous médecin chef shouted contradictory orders at the brancardiers, and passed into real crises of hysterical rage.
"Let me embrace you!" The soldier drew back, shaking his head sadly. "No," he said, his voice breaking "no, my Father, you must not embrace me now. I may have been a brave man once. But now I am a coward. Let me tell you everything. My wounds were bad, but not desperate. The brancardiers carried me down to Verdun, at night I suppose, but I was unconscious; and so to the hospital at Vaudelaincourt.
The notes, signed by half a dozen names, described the complete paralysis below the waist, with a few other medical details. Monsignor looked again at the girl on the other side of the table, guarded by the brancardiers and a couple of doctors, while the monk talked to him rapidly in Latin. He saw her closed eyes and colourless lips.
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