I had been assigned to the tent where those most dangerously wounded were brought. There were about forty of them, upon a thin layer of straw, and some even on the bare ground. The place swarmed with flies, and it stank of dejecta and of dead bodies. When the sun was high, the heat was stifling. In the evening, the patients’ teeth chattered with cold. Some of them were lads of the 20th corps, men with the colours when the war broke out, all Parisians, of simple and engaging courage, and able to take an interest in their bedfellows. There were men from Provence, the pain of whose wounds forced tears from their eyes, and who confided to me their amours as they might have done to a sister. When the pain was at its worst, they all cried out: “Maman!” It was heartrending.
I tended them. By day and by night, a thousand times I ministered to their needs. There were but two basins for seven hundred and twenty wounded. I made part of a shell serve me for a third. I watched the dying; I gave what consolation I could; I buried the dead. Always guarded by two Pomeranian soldiers, I went through the village begging soup for the poor lads. The inhabitants were utterly terrorized. Some of the women, one of them lame and one but a girl of twelve, astonished me by their persistent kindness. Under the eyes of the Germans as they were, the ardour they displayed, simply Christian in character, was truly heroic. Often, however, I had to make up for the lack of rations by a gay speech, overflowing with hope. Continually it was necessary to remake the straw pillows under the heads of the wounded, to rearrange their bedding, to help them to move. Always, beneath the low canvas roof, was to be heard the same orchestra of cries, hollow sighs, death rattles, and lamentations. Occasionally, during the long, cold night, lacking strength to carry the body of some comrade who had just died all the way across the meadow to the burial pit, dropping the dead man, I would fall beside him and go to sleep there.
On the 20th, when our field hospital was already in fair order, a Prussian captain came by with his company. He stopped, commandeered the horse of our surgeon-in-chief, M. Bergé, and promptly mounted it. Then, in grating and sonorous French, he called out: “Fear nothing, wounded. I know that in your newspapers—I read them, the _Figaro_, the _Temps_—they term us barbarians. We are not barbarians. For my part, I bear a French name; I am the descendant of French refugees. My name is Charles de Beaulieu. I swear to you that you will be well cared for in Germany. Germany respects the red cross.”