The heroine of Bourg is Madame Dugas.  Once more to repeat history:  Before the war Madame Dugas, being a woman of fashion and large wealth, lived the usual life of her class.  She had a chateau near Bourg for the autumn months:  hunting and shooting before 1914 were as much the fashion on the large estates of France as in England.  She had a villa on the Rivera, a hotel in Paris, and a cottage at Dinard.  But as soon as war broke out all these establishments were either closed or placed at the disposal of the Government.  She cleaned out a large hotel in Bourg and installed as many beds as it was possible to buy at the moment.  Then she sent word that she was ready to accommodate a certain number of wounded and asked for nurses and surgeons.

The Government promptly took advantage of her generous offer, and her hospital was so quickly filled with wounded men that she was obliged to take over and furnish another large building.  This soon overflowing as well as the military hospitals of the district, she looked about in vain for another house large enough to make extensive installations worth while.

During all those terrible months of the war, when the wounded arrived in Bourg by every train, and household after household put on its crepe, there was one great establishment behind its lofty walls that took no more note of the war than if the newspapers that never passed its iron gates were giving daily extracts from ancient history.  This was the Convent de la Visitation.  Its pious nuns had taken the vow never to look upon the face of man.  If, as they paced under the great oaks of their close, or the stately length of their cloisters telling their beads, or meditating on the negation of earthly existence and the perfect joys of the future, they heard an echo of the conflict that was shaking Europe, it was only to utter a prayer that the souls of those who had obeyed the call of their country and fallen gloriously as Frenchmen should rest in peace.  Not for a moment did the idea cross their gentle minds that any mortal force short of invasion by the enemy could bring them into contact with it.

But that force was already in possession of Bourg.  Madame Dugas was a woman of endless resource.  Like many another woman in this war the moment her executive faculties, long dormant, were stirred, that moment they began to develop like the police microbes in fevered veins.

She had visited that convent.  She knew that its great walls sheltered long rooms and many of them.  It would make an ideal hospital and she determined that a hospital it should be.

There was but one recourse.  The Pope.  Would she dare?  People wondered.  She did.  The Pope, who knew that wounded men cannot wait, granted the holy nuns a temporary dispensation from their vows; and when I walked through the beautiful Convent of the Visitation with Madame Dugas, Madame Goujon, and M. Loiseau, there were soldiers under every tree and nuns were reading to them.