“He was such a little man, I could not believe at first that he could be President,” she said.  “I thought that the President of France would be a big man.  But he was very agreeable and, I am sure, very wise.  Then there were other men with him, a Monsieur de-de-Deschanel, who was president of something or other in Paris, and Monsieur du-du—­yes, that was it, Du Bag.  He also is president of something in Paris.  They were very agreeable, too.”

“And your Legion of Honour?”

“Oh, my medal that M. le President gave me!  I keep that in a drawer.  I do not wear it every day when I am in my working-clothes.”

“Have you ever been to Paris?”

“No, monsieur.”

“They will make a great ado over you when you go.”

“I must stay in Gerbeviller.  If I stayed during the fighting and when the Germans were here, why should I leave now?  Gerbeviller is my home.  There is much to do here and there will be more to do when the people who were driven away return.”

These nuns saw their townspeople stood up against a wall and shot; they saw their townspeople killed by shells.  The cornucopia of war’s horrors was emptied at their door.  And women of a provincial town, who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have the stoicism to witness.

What feature of the nightmare had held most vividly in Sister Julie’s mind?  It is hard to say; but the one which she dwelt on was about the boy and the cow.  The invaders, when they came in, ordered that no inhabitant leave his house, on pain of death.  A boy of ten took his cow to pasture in the morning as usual.  He did not see anything wrong in that.  The cow ought to go to pasture.  And he was shot, for he broke a military regulation.  He might have been a spy using the cow as a blind.  War does not bother to discriminate.  It kills.

Sister Julie can enjoy a joke, particularly on the Germans, and her cheerful smile and genuine laugh are a lesson to all people who draw long faces in time of trouble and weep over spilt milk.  A buoyant temperament and unshaken faith carried her through her ordeal.  Though her hair is white, youth’s optimism and confidence in the future and the joy of victory for France overshadowed the present.  The town and church would be rebuilt; children would play in the streets again; there was a lot of the Lord’s work to do yet.

In every word and thought she is French—­French in her liveliness of spirit and quickness of comprehension; wholly French there on the borderland of Germany.  If we only went to the outskirts of the town, she reminded us, we could see how the soldiers of her beloved France fought and why she was happy to have remained in Gerbeviller to welcome them back.

In sight of that intact brewery and that wreck of a church is a gentle slope of open field, cut by a road.  Along the crest were many mounds as thick as the graves of a cemetery, and by the side of the road was a temporary monument above a big mound, surrounded by a sanded walk and a fence.  The dead had been thickest at this point, and here they had been laid in a vast grave.  The surviving comrades had made that monument; and, in memory of what the dead had fought for, the living said that they were not yet ready to quit fighting.