Curiously enough, the next woman whose work has made her notable, that Madame Goujon took me to see, was very much like Madame Dugas in appearance, certainly of the same type.

Val de Grace is the oldest military hospital in Paris.  It covers several acres and was begun by Louis XIII and finished by Napoleon.  Before the war it was run entirely by men, but one by one or group by group these men, all reservists, were called out and it became a serious problem how to keep it up to its standard.  Of course women were all very well as nurses, but it took strong men and many of them to cook for thousands of wounded, and there was the problem of keeping the immense establishment of many buildings well swept and generally clean.  But the men had to go, reformes were not strong enough for the work, every bed was occupied—­one entire building by tuberculars—­and they must both eat and suffer in sanitary conditions.

Once more they were obliged to have recourse to Woman.

Madame Olivier, like Madame Dugas a dame du monde and an infirmiere major, went to one of the hospitals at the Front on the day war broke out, nursed under fire, of course, but displayed so much original executive ability as well as willingness to do anything to help, no matter what, that she was soon put in charge of the wounded on trains.  After many trips, during which she showed her uncommon talent for soothing the wounded, making them comfortable even when they were packed like sardines on the floor, and bringing always some sort of order out of the chaos of those first days, she was invited to take hold of the problem of Val de Grace.

She had solved it when I paid my visit with Madame Goujon.  She not only had replaced all the men nurses and attendants with women but was training others and sending them off to military hospitals suffering from the same sudden depletions as Val de Grace.  She also told me that three women do the work of six men formerly employed, and that they finished before ten in the morning, whereas the men never finished.  The hospital when she arrived had been in a condition such as men might tolerate but certainly no woman.  I walked through its weary miles (barring the tuberculosis wards) and I never saw a hospital look more sanitarily span.

But the kitchen was the show place of Val de Grace, little as the women hard at work suspected it.  Where Madame Olivier found those giantesses I cannot imagine; certainly not in a day.  She must have sifted France for them.  They looked like peasant women and no doubt they were.  Only the soil could produce such powerful cart-horse females.  And only such cart-horses could have cooked in the great kitchen of Val de Grace.  On a high range that ran the length of the room were copper pots as large as vats, full of stew, and these the Brobdinagians stirred with wooden implements that appeared to my shattered senses as large as spades.  No doubt they were of inferior dimensions, but even so they were formidable.  How those women stirred and stirred those steaming messes!  I never shall forget it.  And they could also move those huge pots about, those terrible females.  I thought of the French Revolution.