So supplies came in plentifully, and Sara Lee pared vegetables and sang a bit under her breath, and glowed with good will when at night the weary vanguard of a weary little army stopped at her door and scraped the mud off its boots and edged in shyly.
She was very happy, and her soup was growing famous. It is true that the beef she used was not often beef, but she did not know that, and merely complained that the meat was stringy. Now and then there was no beef at all, and she used hares instead. On quiet days, when there was little firing beyond the poplar trees, she went about with a basket through the neglected winter gardens of the town. There were Brussels sprouts, and sometimes she found in a cellar carrots or cabbages. She had potatoes always.
It was at night then, from seven in the evening until one, that the little house was busiest. Word had gone out through the trenches beyond the poplar trees that slightly wounded men needing rest before walking back to their billets, exhausted and sick men, were welcome to the little house. It was soon necessary to give the officers tickets for the men. René took them in at the door, with his rifle in the hollow of his arm, and he was as implacable as a ticket taker at the opera.
Never once in all the months of her life there did Sara Lee have an ugly word, an offensive glance. But, though she never knew this, many half articulate and wholly earnest prayers were offered for her in those little churches behind the lines where sometimes the men slept, and often they prayed.
She was very businesslike. She sent home to the Ladies' Aid Society a weekly record of what had been done: So many bowls of soup; so many cups of chocolate; so many minor injuries dressed. Because, very soon, she found first aid added to her activities. She sickened somewhat at first. Later she allowed to Marie much of the serving of food, and in the little _salle à manger_ she had ready on the table basins, water, cotton, iodine and bandages.
"It is a matter of cleanliness," he said. "First one washes the wound and then there is the iodine. Then cotton, a bandage, and--a surgeon could do little more."
Henri and Jean came often. And more than once during the first ten days Jean spent the night rolled in a blanket by the kitchen fire, and Henri disappeared. He was always back in the morning, however, looking dirty and very tired. Sara Lee sewed more than one rent for him, those days, but she was strangely incurious. It was as though, where everything was strange, Henri's erratic comings and goings were but a part with the rest.