Nuns were also nursing those still in the wards, for nurses are none too plentiful in France even yet, and Madame Dugas had stipulated for the nuns as well as for the convent.

It was a southern summer day.  The grass was green.  The ancient trees were heavy with leaves.  Younger and more graceful trees drooped from the terrace above a high wall in the rear.  The sky was blue.  The officers, the soldiers, looked happy, the nuns placid.  It was an oasis in the desert of war.

I leave obvious ruminations to the reader.

When I met Madame Dugas, once more I wondered if all Frenchwomen who were serving or sorrowing were really beautiful or if it were but one more instance of the triumph of clothes.  Madame Dugas is an infirmiere major, and over her white linen veil flowed one of bright blue, transparent and fine.  She wore the usual white linen uniform with the red cross on her breast, but back from her shoulders as she walked through the streets with us streamed a long dark blue cloak.  She is a very tall, very slender woman, with a proud and lofty head, a profile of that almost attenuated thinness that one sees only on a Frenchwoman, and only then when the centuries have done the chiseling.  As we walked down those long, narrow, twisted streets of Bourg between the high walls with the trees sweeping over the coping, she seemed to me the most strikingly beautiful woman I had ever seen.  But whether I shall still think so if I see her one of these days in a Paris ballroom I have not the least idea.

Madame Dugas runs three hospitals at her own expense and is her own committee.  Like the rest of the world she expected the war to last three months, and like the rest of her countrywomen who immediately offered their services to the state she has no intention of resigning until what is left of the armies are in barracks once more.  She lives in a charming old house in Bourg, roomy and well furnished and with a wild and classic garden below the terrace at the back. (Some day I shall write a story about that house and garden.) Here she rests when she may, and here she gave us tea.

One wonders if these devoted Frenchwomen will have anything left of their fortunes if the war continues a few years longer.  Madame Dugas made no complaint, but as an example of the increase in her necessary expenditures since 1914 she mentioned the steadily rising price of chickens.  They had cost two francs at the beginning of the war and were now ten.  I assumed that she gave her grands blesses chicken broth, which is more than they get in most hospitals.

Many of the girls who had danced in her salons two years before, and even their younger sisters, who had had no chance to “come out,” are helping Madame Dugas, both as nurses and in many practical ways; washing and doing other work of menials as cheerfully as they ever played tennis or rode in la chasse.

II