had to threaten some of his own military police with the terrors of
court-martial.

The wounded were allowed at last to come to Paris, and the
surgeons who had stood with idle hands found more than enough
work to do, and the ladies of France who had put on nurses' dresses
walked very softly and swiftly through long wards, no longer thrilled
with the beautiful sentiment of smoothing the brows of handsome
young soldiers, but thrilled by the desperate need of service, hard
and ugly and terrible, among those poor bloody men, agonizing
through the night, helpless in their pain, moaning before the rescue of
death. The faint-hearted among these women fled panic-stricken,
with blanched faces, to Nice and Monte Carlo and provincial
châteaux, where they played with less unpleasant work. But there
were not many like that. Most of them stayed, nerving themselves to
the endurance of those tragedies, finding in the weakness of their
womanhood a strange new courage, strong as steel, infinitely patient,
full of pity cleansed of all false sentiment. Many of these fine ladies of
France, in whose veins ran the blood of women who had gone very
bravely to the guillotine, were animated by the spirit of their
grandmothers and by the ghosts of French womanhood throughout
the history of their country, from Geneviève to Sister Julie, and putting
aside the frivolity of life which had been their only purpose, faced the
filth and horrors of the hospitals without a shudder and with the virtue
of nursing nuns.

Into the streets of Paris, therefore, came the convalescents and the
lightly wounded, and one-armed or one-legged officers or simple
poilus with bandaged heads and hands could be seen in any
restaurant among comrades who had not yet received their baptism