Ah!  I was glad of it for our blesses!  I said to my Sisters—­’Give it them! and not by thimblefuls—­give them enough!’ Ah, poor things!—­it made some of them sleep.  It was all we had.  One day, I passed a soldier who was lying back in his bed with a sigh of satisfaction. ’Ah, ma Soeur, ca resusciterait un mort!’ (That would bring a dead man to life!) So I stopped to ask what they had just given him.  And it was a large glass of Lachryma Christi!

“But then came the day when the Commandant, the French Commandant, you understand, came to me and said—­’Sister, I have sad news for you.  I am going.  I am taking away the wounded—­and all my stores.  Those are my orders.’

“’But, mon Commandant, you’ll leave me some of your stores for the grands blesses, whom you leave behind—­whom you can’t move? What!—­you must take it all away?  Ah, ca—­non!  I don’t want any extras—­I won’t take your chloroform—­I won’t take your bistouris—­I won’t take your electric things—­but—­hand over the iodine! (en avant l’iode!) hand over the cotton-wool!—­hand over the gauze!  Come, my Sisters!’ I can tell you I plundered him!—­and my Sisters came with their aprons, and the linen-baskets—­we carried away all we could.”

Then she described the evacuation of the French wounded at night—­300 of them—­all but the 19 worst cases left behind.  There were no ambulances, no proper preparation of any kind.

“Oh! it was a confusion!—­an ugly business!” (ce n’etait pas rose!).  The Sisters tore down and split up the shutters, the doors, to serve as stretchers; they tore sheets into long strips and tied “our poor children” on to the shutters, and hoisted them into country carts of every sort and description.  “Quick!—­Quick!” She gave us a wonderful sense of the despairing haste in which the night retreat had to be effected.  All night their work went on.  The wounded never made a sound—­“they let us do what we would without a word.  And as for us, my Sisters bound these big fellows (ces gros et grands messieurs) on to the improvised stretchers, like a mother who fastens her child in its cot.  Ah!  Jesus! the poverty and the misery of that time!”

By the early morning all the French wounded were gone except the nineteen helpless cases, and all the French soldiers had cleared out of the village except the 57 Chasseurs, whose orders were to hold the place as long as they could, to cover the retreat of the rest.

Then, when the Chasseurs finally withdrew, the Bavarian troops rushed up the town in a state of furious excitement, burning it systematically as they advanced, and treating the inhabitants as M. Mirman has described.  Soon Soeur Julie knew that they were coming up the hill towards the hospital.  I will quote the very language—­homely, Biblical, direct—­in which she described her feelings. “Mes reins flottaient comme ca—­ils allaient tomber a mes talons.  Instantanement, pas une goutte de salive dans la bouche!” Or—­to translate it in the weaker English idiom—­“My heart went down into my heels—­all in a moment, my mouth was dry as a bone!”