The German officers drew up, and asked for the Superior of the hospital.  She went out to meet them.  Here she tried to imitate the extraordinary arrogance of the German manner.

“They told me they would have to burn the hospital, as they were informed men had been shooting from it at their troops.

“I replied that if anyone had been shooting, it was the French Chasseurs, who were posted in a street close by, and had every right to shoot!”

At last they agreed to let the hospital alone, and burn no more houses, if she would take in the German wounded.  So presently the wards of the little hospital were full again to overflowing.  But while the German wounded were coming in the German officers insisted on searching the nineteen French wounded for arms.

“I had to make way for them—­I had to say, ‘Entrez, Messieurs!’”

Then she dropped her voice, and said between her teeth—­“Think how hard that was for a Lorrainer!”

So two German officers went to the ward where the nineteen Frenchmen lay, all helpless cases, and a scene followed very like that in the hospital at Senlis.  One drew his revolver and covered the beds, the other walked round, poniard in hand, throwing back the bedclothes to look for arms.  But they found nothing—­“only blood!  For we had had neither time enough nor dressings enough to treat the wounds properly that night.”

A frightful moment!—­the cowering patients—­the officers in a state of almost frenzied excitement, searching bed after bed.  At the last bed, occupied by a badly wounded and quite helpless youth, the officer carrying the dagger brought the blade of it so near to the boy’s throat that Soeur Julie rushed forward, and placed her two hands in front of the poor bare neck.  The officer dropped both arms to his side, she said, “as if he had been shot,” and stood staring at her, quivering all over.  But from that moment she had conquered them.

For the German wounded, Soeur Julie declared she had done her best, and the officer in charge of them afterwards wrote her a letter of thanks.  Then her mouth twisted a little.  “But I wasn’t—­well, I didn’t spoil them! (Je n’etais pas trop tendre); I didn’t give them our best wine!” And one officer whose wounds she dressed, a Prussian colonel who never deigned to speak to a Bavarian captain near him, was obliged to accept a good many home truths from her.  He was convinced that she would poison his leg unless he put on the dressings himself.  But he allowed her to bandage him afterwards.  During this operation—­which she hinted she had performed in a rather Spartan fashion!—­“he whimpered all the time,” and she was able to give him a good deal of her mind on the war and the behaviour of his troops.  He and the others, she said, were always talking about their Kaiser; “one might have thought they saw him sitting on the clouds.”