People said: How proud of him she must be. He had always been thought a little dull, a dear boy, but perhaps a little dull; one would not have dreamed he had it in him.
People said: They had always been such a devoted couple, an ideal young couple. How sad it would be if anything happened to him.
In spite of the difficulties due to his being réformé, he got out at last to the Front. He was wounded only a short time after, not in any attack, or with any glory, but in bringing up the comrades' soup to the trenches. It was a shell wound in the thigh, not especially dangerous. He was invalided straight through to Paris, to one of the big city hospitals, and put, of course, in the ward with other common soldiers.
It was a moment of terrible crowding of the hospitals: doctors and nurses were overworked; there was necessarily much confusion. It was no one's fault, perhaps, only the inevitableness of things, that for three days the Surgeon Major had no time himself to attend to the less badly wounded.
The man with the wound in the thigh asked nothing of any one. He did not even ask, they say, to have his people sent for.
They were all down at the château; it was only after forty-eight hours that they got word of what had happened to him and where he was.
His wife came up to town. His mother, of course, was not able to come, and it had not seemed worth while to bring the little boys.
That was when he had been for two days in the hospital.
Here is a part of the thing that people say they do not understand.
It seems as if his wife might have had him moved out of the common ward. It is a little dreadful to think of him there, who had always been used to so much luxury--among the grey blankets, the coarse grey sheets, the beds and stretcher-beds crowded together, a bottle of the hospital champagne on the night-table, the black man in the next bed screaming. She might, it would seem, have had in their own doctor, or any one of the big doctors. She surely might have got permission to stay in the ward and sit by him the night he died.
He died the night after the operation. They had amputated too late. It was only the third day that the chief saw him. They amputated next morning, and he died in the night.