Read Ebook: Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) Essay 1: Robespierre by Morley John

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Uncle Giles's was a singular case, "one of those mysterious maladies which baffle even the wisest physicians," as he used to say himself. A good many ladies in those days had mysterious maladies which baffled even the wisest physicians, and they used to enjoy Uncle Giles above everything. No other man had such an understanding of their symptoms and such sympathy for their sufferings. The easy chair beside Uncle Giles's invalid couch was seldom vacant. Ladies going away after having left a vaseful of flowers for him, and a plateful of cake, and two or three jars of jelly, and some cold breasts of chicken, would say with shining, exalted countenances, "In spite of his terrible trials, what an inspiration our friend can be! An hour with that good man is like an hour on Pisgah."

They would, as like as not, make such a remark to the brave invalid's brother or cousin who was earning the money to keep the household going. I am afraid we are no longer as a family very sure what or where Pisgah is, although we know it is in the Bible somewhere, but there is a fierce family tradition against fussing over your health which is as vivid this minute as on the day when the brother or cousin or nephew of Uncle Giles turned away with discourteous haste from the shining-faced lady and stamped rudely into another room. Doctors enter our homes for a broken leg or for a confinement, but seldom for anything else.

When the Civil War came on, and Uncle Giles was the only man in the family left at home, he rose splendidly to the occasion and devoted himself to the instruction of his kinswomen, ignorant of the technique of warfare. From his invalid couch he explained to them the strategy of the great battles in which their brothers and husbands and fathers were fighting; and when the letters from hospital came with news of the wounded, who but Uncle Giles was competent to understand and explain the symptoms reported. As a rule the women of his family were too frantically busy with their Martha-like concentration on the mere material problems of wartime life to give these lucid and intellectual discussions of strategy the attention and consideration they deserved. The war, however, though it seemed endless, lasted after all but four years. And when it was over, Uncle Giles was free to go back to discussions more congenial to his literary and esthetic tastes.

Looking back, through the perspective of a generation-and-a-half, I can see the exact point of safely acknowledged middle-age when Uncle Giles's health began cautiously to improve; but it must have been imperceptible to those around him, so gradual was the change. His kin grew used to each successive stage of his recovery before they realized it was there, and nobody seems to have been surprised to have Uncle Giles pass into a remarkably hale and vigorous old age.

"Invalids often are strong in their later years," he said of himself. "It is God's compensation for their earlier sufferings."

He passed into the full rewards of the most rewarded old age. It was a period of apotheosis for him, and a very lengthy one at that, for he lived to be well past eighty. In any gathering Uncle Giles, erect and handsome, specklessly attired, his smooth old face neatly shaved, with a quaint, gentle, old-world courtesy and protecting chivalry in his manner to ladies, was a conspicuous and much-admired figure. People brought their visitors to call on him, and to hear him tell in his vivid, animated way of old times in the country. His great specialty was the Civil War. At any gathering where veterans of the War were to be honored, Uncle Giles held every one breathless with his descriptions of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville; and when he spoke of Mobile Bay and Sherman's march, how his voice pealed, how his fine eyes lighted up! Strangers used to say to themselves that it was easy to see what an eloquent preacher he must have been when he was in the active ministry. The glum old men in worn blue coats used to gather in a knot in the farthest corner, and in low tones, not to interrupt his discourse, would chat to each other of crops, fishing, and politics.

Somewhere we have a scrapbook in which an ironic cousin of mine carefully pasted in all the newspaper articles that were written about Uncle Giles in his old age, and the many handsome obituary notices which appeared when he finally died. I can remember my father's getting it out occasionally, and reading the clippings to himself with a very grim expression on his face; but it always moved my light-hearted, fun-loving mother to peals of laughter. After all, she was related to Uncle Giles only by marriage and felt no responsibility for him.

The other day, in looking over some old legal papers, I came across a yellowed letter, folded and sealed with three handsome pale-blue seals on its back. The seals were made with the crested cameo ring which Uncle Giles always wore, bearing what he insisted was the "coat of arms" of our family. The handwriting of the letter was beautiful, formed with an amorous pride in every letter. It was from Uncle Giles to one of his uncles, my great-grandfather's brother. It had lain there lost for half a century or more, and of course I had never seen it before; but every word of it was familiar to me as I glanced it over. It began in a manner characteristic of Uncle Giles's polished courtesy, with inquiries after every member of his uncle's family, and a pleasant word for each one. He then detailed the state of his health, which, alas, left much to be desired, and seemed, so the doctors told him, to require urgently a summer in the mountains. Leaving this subject, he jumped to the local news of the town where he was then living, and told one or two amusing stories. In one of them I remember was this phrase, "I told her I might be poor, but that a gentleman of good birth did not recognize poverty as a member of the family." Through a neat transition after this he led up again to the subject of his health and to the desirability of his passing some months in the mountains, "in the pure air of God's great hills." Then he entered upon a discreet, pleasant, whimsical reference to the fact that only a contribution from his uncle's purse could make this possible. There never was anybody who could beat Uncle Giles on ease and grace, and pleasant, pungent humor when it came to asking for money. The only person embarrassed in that situation was the one of whom Uncle Giles was expecting the loan.

I read no more. With no conscious volition of mine, my hand had scrunched the letter into a ball, and my arm, without my bidding, had hurled the ball into the heart of the fire.

But as I reflected on the subject afterwards, and thought of the influence which Uncle Giles has always had on our family, it occurred to me that I was wrong. Uncle Giles ought not to be forgotten. I ought to have saved that letter to show to my children.

"WHAT GOES UP...."

Among the many agreeably arranged European lives which were roughly interrupted by the war, I know of none more snugly and compactly comfortable than that of Octavie Moreau. Indeed, for some years there had been in the back of my mind a faint notion of something almost indiscreet in the admirably competent way in which 'Tavie arranged her life precisely to her taste. I don't mean that it was an easeful or elegant or self-indulgent life. She cared as little for dress as any other intellectual Frenchwoman, let herself get portly, did up her hair queerly, and the rigorously hearth-and-home matrons of Tourciennes pointed her out to their young daughters as a horrible example of what happens to the looks of a woman who acquires too much learning. As for ease and self-indulgence, 'Tavie's vigorous personality and powerful, disciplined brain, as well as the need to earn her living, kept her from laying on intellectual fat. But all that vigorous personality, that powerful brain, as well as all the money which she competently earned, seemed more and more to be concentrated on her own comfort and on nothing else. Her excellent salary as professor of science in the girls' Lyc?e was almost doubled by what she made by private lessons, for she was an inspired natural teacher, who can, as the saying goes, teach anybody anything. In the thirty years of her life in Tourciennes she has pulled innumerable despairing boys and girls through dreaded examinations in science and mathematics; and parents pay well, the world over, for having their boys and girls pulled through examinations. They respect the woman who can do it, even if, as in Octavie's case, their respect is tempered with considerable disapprobation of eccentric dress, irreligious ideas, immense skepticism, and cigarette-smoking. And in this case the respect was heightened by Mlle. Moreau's well-known ability to drive a hard bargain and to see through any one else's attempt to do the same. Octavie had plenty of everything, brains, will-power and money; but as far as I could see, she never did anything with this plenty, except to feather her own nest. I mean this quite literally, for 'Tavie had a nest, a pretty, red-roofed, gray-walled, old villa, in the outskirts of Tourciennes, which she had bought years before at a great bargain, and which was the center of her life. Her younger sister, a weaker edition of Octavie, who lived with her, and kept house for her, and revolved about her, and adored her, and depended on her, joined with her in this, as in everything else. Those two women visibly existed for the purpose of bringing to perfection that house and the fine, walled garden about it. Long before anybody else in our circle in France thought of such a thing as having a real bathroom with hot and cold water, 'Tavie had one, tiled, and glazed, and gleaming. Octavie's library was the best one in that part of France. Never were there such perfectly laid and kept floors as 'Tavie's, nor such a kitchen garden, nor closets so convenient and ingeniously arranged, nor a kitchen of such perfection. All well-to-do kitchens in the north of France are works of art, but 'Tavie's was several degrees more shining and copper-kettled and red-tiled and polished than any other, just as the food which was prepared there was several degrees more succulent, even than the superexcellent meals served elsewhere in that affluent industrial city of the North. As I finished one of 'Tavie's wonderful dinners, and stepped with her into the ordered marvel of her great garden, I remember one day having on the tip of my tongue some half-baked remark about how far the same amount of intelligence and energy would have gone towards providing more decent homes for a few of the poor in her quarter--for the housing of the poor in Tourciennes was notorious for its wretchedness. But you may be sure I said nothing of the sort. Nobody ventured to make any such sanctimonious comment to caustic Octavie Moreau, fifty-four years old, weighty, powerful, utterly indifferent to other people's opinions, her fine mind at the perfection of its maturity, her well-tempered personality like a splendid tool at the service of her will, her heart preserved from care about other people's troubles by her biological conviction of the futility of trying to help any one not energetic enough to help himself. She was not unkind to people she happened to know personally, occasionally spilling over on the needy ones a little of her superabundant vigor, and some of the money she earned so easily. But in her heart she scorned people who were either materially or morally needy, as she scorned every one who was weak and ignorant and timorous, who was not strong enough to walk straight up to what he wanted and take it. She had always done that. Anybody who couldn't ...!

Then the war began and well-planned lives became like grains of dust in a whirlwind. Tourciennes was at once taken by the Germans and held until the very last of the war, and for more than four years none of the rest of us had a word from 'Tavie and her sister. Beyond the trenches Tourciennes seemed more remote than the palest asteroid.

But after the armistice, what with letters and visits, we soon learned all about their life under the German occupation, in most ways like the lives of all our other friends in the North, the grinding round of petty and great vexations and extortions and oppressions, and slow, dirty starvation of body, mind, and soul which has been described so many times since Armistice Day--but with one notable exception. To Octavie life had brought something more than this.

Early in the third year of the war, the grimly enduring town was appalled by a decree, issued from German Headquarters. In reprisal for something said to have happened in far-away Alsace-Lorraine, forty of the leading women of Tourciennes were to be taken as hostages, conveyed to a prison-camp in the north of Germany, and left there indefinitely till the grievance in Alsace-Lorraine had been adjusted to the satisfaction of the German government.

We knew some of the others, too, either by reputation or personally, and could imagine the heart-sick horror in which their families saw them make their few hasty preparations for departure. Here is a typical case. One of the names on the list was that of Mme. Orl?anne, a woman of seventy. She was then so weak from malassimilation of war-food that she had not been out of doors for months! It was nothing less than a death-sentence for her. Her family did not even let her see the list. Her elder daughter, married to a wealthy manufacturer, went to the German officials and offered herself to be deported as a substitute, although she had two children, a girl of eight and a little boy of three! She was accepted, and, death in her heart, set about making up the tiny bundle of necessaries--all they were allowed to carry. Her little girl was old enough to take up the tradition of tragic stoicism of her elders and listened with a blanched face to the instructions of her desperate mother, who told her that there was now nothing but dignity left to Frenchwomen. When the German guard came to tell Mme. Baudoin that the truck which was to carry the hostages away to the railroad was waiting at the door, little Elise, rigid and gray, kissed her mother good-by silently, though after the truck had gone, she fainted and lay unconscious for hours. But Raoul, only a baby, screamed, and struck at the German soldier, clung wildly to his mother with hysteric strength, and after she had gone, broke away from his aunt, rushed out of the street door, shrieking, "Mother, Mother! don't go away from Raoul!" and flung himself frantically upon his mother's skirts. She said to me, as she told me of this, "dying will be easy compared to that moment!" But without weakening she did the intolerable thing, the only thing there was to do, she reached down, tore the little boy's tense fingers from her dress, and climbed up into the truck. "As I looked away from Raoul I saw that tears were running down the cheeks of the German guard who stood at the back of the truck."

Ah, this human race we belong to!

Shuddering with the anguish of such scenes of separation, the hostages were locked for three days into cattle-cars, cold, windowless, jolting prisons, where they lived over and over those unbearable last moments with children, or sisters, or parents, or husbands, whom they never expected to see again. At the end of this ordeal, the wretched women, numb, half-starved, limping along in their disordered garments, raging inwardly, inflamed with indignant hatred for the soldiers who marshaled them, were brought together in their prison and left alone, save for two bored guards who sat at the door and stared at them.

The prison camp was an enormous one in the north of Germany, a dreary clutter of rough wooden buildings thrown down on a flat, sandy plain, entangled and surrounded by miles of barbed-wire fencing. The prison-room allotted to the forty women from Tourciennes was a high, bare loft, like a part of an ill-built, hastily constructed barn. Around three walls were tiers of bunks, filled with damp, moldy straw, a couple of dirty blankets on each. In the middle of the room was a smallish stove, rather tall and thin in shape, with one hole in the top, closed by a flat lid. An iron kettle stood on the stove. Windows were set in one wall of the room. Under the windows ran a long bench, and before it stood a long table made of a wide board. There was nothing else to be seen, except grease and caked filth on the rough, unpainted boards of the floor and walls. The last of the women staggered into the room; the door was shut, and they faced each other in the gray winter light which filtered in through the smeared panes of the windows.

All during the black nightmare of the journey, every one of them had been quivering with suppressed anguish. Absorbed each in her own grief and despair, they had lain on the thin layer of straw on the floor of the freight car, at the end of their strength, undone by the ignominy of their utter defenselessness before brute force. The marks of tears showed on their gray, unwashed faces, but they had no more tears to shed now. They leaned against the walls and the bunks, their knees shaking with exhaustion, and looked about them at the dreary, dirty desolation of the room which from now on was to be their world. The guards stared at them indifferently, seeing nothing of any interest in that group of prisoners more than in any other, especially as these were women no longer young, disheveled, wrinkled, unappetizing, with uncombed, gray hair, and grimy hands.

A little stir among them, and there was Octavie, our 'Tavie, on her feet, haggard with fatigue, dowdy, crumpled, battered, but powerful and magnetic. She was speaking to them, speaking with the authority of her long years of directing others, with the weight and assurance of her puissant personality.

Her bold, strong voice, her dauntless look, her masterful gesture, brought them out of their lassitude, brought them from all sides and corners of the room, where they had abandoned themselves, brought them in a compact group close about her. She went on, her steady eyes going from one to the other, "I think I know what is the first thing to do; to take a solemn vow to stick by each other loyally. You know it is said that women always quarrel among themselves, and that all French people do. We are in a desperate plight. If we quarrel ever, at all: if we are divided, we are undone. We're of all sorts, Catholics, free-thinkers, aristocrats, radicals, housekeepers, business-women, and we don't know each other very well. But we are all women, civilized women, Frenchwomen, sisters! Nobody can help us but ourselves. But if we give all we have, they can never conquer us!"

She stopped and looked at them deeply, her strong, ugly face, white with intensity. "A vow, my friends, a vow from every one of us, by what she holds most sacred, that she will summon all her strength to give of her very best for the common good. In the name of our love for those we have left--" her voice broke, and she could not go on. She lifted her hand silently and held it up, her eyes fixed on them. The other hands went up, the drawn faces steadied, the quivering hearts, centered each on its own suffering, calmed by taking thought for others. The very air in the barrack-room seemed less stifling. The two German guards looked on, astonished by the incomprehensible ceremony. These scattered, half-dead women, flung into the room like cattle, who had not seemed to know each other, all at once to be one unit!

Octavie drew a long breath. Then, homely, familiar, coherent as though she were giving a preliminary explanation to a class at the beginning of a school-year, "Now let us understand clearly what is happening to us, so that we can defend ourselves against it. What is it that is being done to us? An attempt is being made to break us down, physically and morally. But these people around us here are not the ones who wish this; they are not as intelligent as we; and they haven't half the personal incentive to accomplish it, that we have to prevent it. We have a thousand resources of ingenuity that they can't touch at all.

"We must begin by economizing every atom possible of our strength, moral and physical. And we can start on that right now by not wasting any more strength hating our guards as we have all been hating the Germans who have had to touch us, so far. We can think of them as demons and infernal forces of evil and make them into horrors that will shadow our every thought. Or we can look straight at them to see what they are, and disregard them, just leave them out of our moral lives, when we see that they are ordinary men, for the most part coarse and common men, and now forced to be abnormal, forced by others into a situation that develops every germ of brutality in them."

At this, young Mme. Baudoin spoke out and told of the German guard who had wept when her little boy was dragged away; and, "I'd rather be in my shoes than his," cried Octavie vigorously.

"So then we sweep them out of our world," she went on, "and that leaves the decks cleared for real action. I should say," she went on with a change of manner, including in one wide humorous glance her own dirty hands, the tangled hair of the others, and the grease and grime of the room, "that the next thing is to organize ourselves to get clean! It's plain only a few of us can do it at a time; let's draw lots to see who begins, and the others can lie down while they wait. Is there anybody here who speaks German enough to ask for soap and water? I see the broom here at hand." A good many of the women proved to have studied German at school, and three of them spoke it. But this did not carry them far. The guards laughed at the idea of soap--nobody in Germany had had soap for months--prisoners were not given such luxuries as towels, and as for water, the tap was down the hall, and the pail was there, and they could carry it for themselves. Besides there was water in the kettle on the stove.

There and then they began their campaign. Lots were drawn, a certain number of tired women collapsed into the bunks to wait, while Octavie organized the others into squads, some to carry water; some to arrange a bathing-place in a corner of the room by hanging up their cloaks on strings stretched from nails; some to sweep out the worst of the dusty litter on the floor.

There was order and purpose in the air. The first woman who emerged from behind the curtain of cloaks, bathed, fresh linen next her clean skin , her hair in order, was like a being from another world, the world they had left. Self-respect came back to the others, as they looked at her.

Yes, there were several, and one whose sister was a woman doctor using curative gymnastics. The meeting voted to make them an athletic committee, to organize such activities.

"Now, our digestions. You know how all prisoners in Germany have always come home with ruined digestions. Is there anything we can do here? Is there anybody here experienced in cooking who could guess at the raw materials in that fearful mess we've just finished, and does she think it might be cooked more intelligently so that it would be better? It stands to reason that the prison cooks would naturally be incompetent, and indifferent to their results. Could we do better ourselves? It also stands to reason that we'd be allowed to, because it would mean less work for the prison kitchens." A group of housewives was appointed to consider this, next day.

"Now, as to cleanliness. Any suggestions about how to get along with no soap? We don't dare use soap on the floor, we have so little, but heaven knows it needs it!" All the practical housekeepers spoke at once now, crying out upon her lack of ingenuity in not thinking of sand. That sandy path outside the barracks, that would do excellently well as an abrasive. With plenty of water and energy, sand and some bricks for rubbing, everything in the room could be cleaned. As they spoke, their faces brightened at the prospect of having cleanliness about them, and of being active once more.

"Anything more for the body?" asked Octavie. "If we keep it exercised and clean, and as well-fed as we can manage it, it ought to last us. Now for the mind. We're going to have hours and hours of leisure time such as we busy women never had before. It's the chance of our lives to go on with our education. Let's share each of us with the other, what we have in our minds. I'll begin. I have chemistry thoroughly, economic history fairly, and the general theory of physics. I'll give a course of lectures on those. Who can do something else?"

They were all appalled at this and protested that she was the only one who had any information to impart; but she scouted the idea and began a relentless person-to-person inquiry. The result was that a group of musicians were organized, under the guidance of the music teacher, to give lectures on the history of music, the lives and works of the composers, church music, ballads, songs, and operas. Three other women who had brought up great families were to dive deep into their memories and lecture to the others, as logically, coherently, and rationally as they could on proper care for children. A shy, thin, drab-colored woman was found to have been brought up in Indo-China, and was to lecture on the life and education of that country. The German-speaking ones were to give a course in German. Another, the daughter of a well-known professor of French literature, was to assemble and arrange what she knew, and be prepared to plan and lead literary discussions. Another, the distinguished founder and former head of the best hospital in Tourciennes, would lecture on the care of the sick--and so on. From one, from another, from them all, Octavie drew potential treasures of experience and information which lay almost visibly shimmering in a great heap before them--"Enough," she cried triumphantly, "to last us for years!"

"And now because we're not solemn Anglo-Saxons, but Frenchwomen, we must plan for some fun, if we're to keep themselves alive," she told them firmly, and at their sad-hearted wincing from the idea, she said, "Yes, we must. It's part of our defensive campaign. Our task is to construct out of our brains and wills a little fortress of civilization, and to protect ourselves behind its walls against demoralization and barbarism! And you all know that amusement is needed for civilization!" A majority agreed to this, a dramatic committee was appointed, and another one on games ; some one else thought of manufacturing balls and inventing games to be played with them, and there were two packs of cards, in the miscellaneous store. The musical group undertook to provide a weekly concert.

One of the subjects which had been canvassed and found no professor was the history of France; but like all French people, they had been soundly and carefully instructed in history and planned, by putting all their memories together, to reconstruct the story of their nation. The meeting was trailing off from serious, purposeful planning to a discursive attempt to get the list of French kings complete, when one of the older women spoke to Octavie in a low tone, the quality of which instantly made silence about them. She said, "But Mlle. Moreau, we have souls too, souls hard beset."

Up to this moment Octavie had, as always, dominated the situation! Now she, who has not been inside a church since she was a child, and who considers herself thoroughly emancipated from what she calls, "all that theological nonsense," was brought up short before the need to make just such a whole-hearted concession to other people's ideas as she had urged on her comrades! She looked hard at the speaker. It was the foundress of the hospital, Mme. Rouart. From her eyes looked out a personality just as strong as Octavie's, and tinctured to the core with faith. Octavie's arrogant intellectualism humbled itself at the sight. She made a gesture of acquiescence and was silent. Mme. Rouart went on, "We're of all sorts of belief, but we can all pray."

Then, after an instant's pause, she said in a low, trembling voice, "Let us pray."

There was an interval of intense silence, during which, so Octavie told me afterwards, quite without any shade of irony, she "prayed as hard as any one ... and after that I prayed every evening when the others did."

Her definition of prayer was characteristic. "I set every ounce of will power to calling up all my strength and endurance. It was wonderful how I felt it rise, when I called," she said gravely. She added that on that first evening after her silent plunge to the deep places of power in her soul, she put both arms around Mme. Rouart's neck and kissed her. "I loved her," she said simply, without attempting her usual skeptical, corrosive analysis of reasons.

The life which went on after this seems as real to me as though I had lived it with them, because when I first saw them, they were fresh from it, and could speak of little else. Every day was thrust at them full of the noisome poison of prison life, idleness, indifference, despair, bitterness, hatred, personal degeneration; and every day they poured out this poison resolutely and filled its place with intelligent occupation! Just to keep clean was a prodigious undertaking, which they attacked in squads, turn by turn. With sand, water, and bricks for rubbing, they kept the room immaculate, though it took hours to do it. Even the blankets were washed out after a fashion, one by one at intervals, by women who had never before so much as washed out a handkerchief. To prepare the food with the more than inadequate utensils and poor materials and the stove unsuited for cooking was a tremendous problem, but they all took turns at it, Octavie humbly acting as scullery-maid when her turn for service came; and the food, though poor, monotonous, and coarse, was infinitely superior, being prepared with brains and patience, to what was served all around them to the apathetic, healthless mobs of Russian and Polish women and men, sunk despairingly in degradation and disease, "giving up and lying down in their dirt," Octavie told me, "to die like beasts."

The older and weaker women among the Tourciennes group, who could not holystone the floor and carry water and wood, were set at the lighter tasks, the endless mending which kept their garments from becoming mere rags, peeling turnips, washing dishes, "making the beds" as they called the process of drying and airing the straw in the bunks.

Every day they went out in all weathers, and exercised and played ball with their home-made, straw-stuffed balls, and every evening they played games, checkers, guessing games, capped rimes, told stories and sang. They all "studied singing" and sang in twos, trios, quartets, or the whole forty in a chorus. They sang anything any one could remember, old folk-songs of which there are such an infinite variety in French, ballads, church-chants, songs from operas.

Octavie told me that one evening, when the false news which was constantly served to them was specially bad, when they had been told that half the French Army was taken prisoner, and the other half in retreat south of Paris, they sang with the tears running down their cheeks, but still sang, and kept their hearts from breaking.

Every day there were "lessons." Octavie was the only trained teacher among them, so that her courses in general science and in economic history were the most professional of the instructions given; but she sedulously attended the "courses" given by the others, putting her disciplined mind on the matter they had to present, and by adroit questionings and summarizings, helped them to order it coherently and logically. Once a week they had dramatics, scenes out of Moli?re, or Labiche, or Shakespeare, or Courteline, farce, tragedy, drama, anything of which anybody had any recollection, with improvisations in the passages which nobody could remember. The German guards looked on astonished at the spirit and dash of the acting, and the laughter and applause from the bunks, where the audience was installed to leave the room clear for a stage. Mme. Baudoin told me that she had never begun to suck the marrow out of the meaty Moli?re comedies, as she did in the stifling days of midsummer when they were giving a series of his plays.

But the night when she called out in a strangled voice that she needed help, found them all organized, each one with her work planned: some who sprang from their beds to heat water; Mme. Rouart prepared as far as her poor substitute for a nurse's outfit would allow her; others ready to lift the shivering, groaning woman from her own bunk to the one which had been cleaned, sterilized with boiling water, and kept ready. The others, who could not help, lay in their beds, their hands clenched tightly in sympathy with the suffering of their comrade, shaken to the heart, as the old drama of human life opened solemnly there in that poor place.

When the baby came, his high-pitched cry was like a shout of triumph.

"All well," announced the nurse to the anxious women, "a fine little boy. No! nobody must stir! Perfect quiet for Mme. Lar?onneur." She busied herself with the mother, while her two assistants oiled the baby and wrapped him in flannel, gloating over the perfections of his tiny finished body, and murmuring to the faces showing over the bunks, "Such a beauty! Such a darling! His little hands!--Oh, see how he fights us!"

The next morning they formed in line to worship him as he lay sleeping beside his mother, and although the sight brought a fierce stab of misery to all the mothers who had left their children behind, the little boy brought into their lives an element of tenderness and hopeful forward-looking which was curative medicine for their sick, women's hearts.

For in spite of all Octavie's moral and physical therapeutics, there were intolerable moments and hours and days for all of them. Women, loving women, used to a life-time of care for others, used to the most united family life, left for months at a time without the slightest news of those they had left, could not, valiantly as they might try, master the fury of longing and anxiety which sprang upon them in the midst of the courageously planned life which they led. They all came to recognize in others the sudden whiteness, the trembling hands, the fixed, unseeing eyes blinded by tears. As far as loving whole-hearted sympathy could ease human hearts, such moments of unendurable pain were tempered by a deep sense of the sharing by all of each one's sorrow.

And then, of course, there were other bad moments and days, meaner, pettier enemies to fight, when it took all of one's self-control to prevent explosions of irritability from overwrought nerves; quarrelsome bitterness, which comes from brooding on grievances; sudden captious hatred for other people's mannerisms, which, in all prison-camps, almost as much as physical suffering, embittered and poisoned prison-life for the high-strung, finely organized, twentieth century prisoners of the Great War. Forty women, with lowered physical health, with heightened nervous sensibility, used to fastidious privacy, now shut up together in one room, with no chance ever to escape each other, crowded each other morally almost as much as physically. Octavie told me there were days when she would have liked to slap them, weak, wavering, superstitious souls that they seemed to her, and turn her face to the wall in her bunk to concentrate on hating the human race. And one of the devout Catholics told me that she often longed so intensely for her old atmosphere of belief and faith that she was almost ill. But they adopted as their battle-cry, "All together to defend our civilization!" and, clinging fiercely to this resolve, they fought away from everything that might have separated them and struggled out on ground common to them all.

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