How long Joan remained there she was never quite sure.  There was little difference between day and night.  After it had been quiet for an hour or so, Madame Lelanne would go out, to return a little later with a wounded man upon her back; and when one died, she would throw him across her shoulder and disappear again up the steps.  Sometimes it was a Frenchman and sometimes a German she brought in.  One gathered that the fight for the village still continued.  There was but little they could do for them beyond dressing their wounds and easing their pain.  Joan and the little chemist took it in turns to relieve one another.  If Madame Lelanne ever slept, it was when she would sit in the shadow behind the stove, her hands upon her knees.  Dubos had been in the house when it had fallen.  Madame Lelanne had discovered him pinned against a wall underneath a great oak beam that had withstood the falling debris.  His beard had been burnt off, but otherwise he had been unharmed.

She seemed to be living in a dream.  She could not shake from her the feeling that it was not bodies but souls that she was tending.  The men themselves gave colour to this fancy of hers.  Stripped of their poor, stained, tattered uniforms, they were neither French nor Germans.  Friend or foe! it was already but a memory.  Often, awakening out of a sleep, they would look across at one another and smile as to a comrade.  A great peace seemed to have entered there.  Faint murmurs as from some distant troubled world would steal at times into the silence.  It brought a pang of pity, but it did not drive away the quiet that dwelt there.

Once, someone who must have known the place and had descended the steps softly, sat there among them and talked with them.  Joan could not remember seeing him enter.  Perhaps unknowing, she had fallen to sleep for a few minutes.  Madame Lelanne was seated by the stove, her great coarse hands upon her knees, her patient, dull, slow-moving eyes fixed upon the speaker’s face.  Dubos was half standing, half resting against the table, his arms folded upon his breast.  The wounded men had raised themselves upon the straw and were listening.  Some leant upon their elbows, some sat with their hands clasped round their knees, and one, with head bent down, remained with his face hidden in his hands.

The speaker sat a little way apart.  The light from the oil lamp, suspended from the ceiling, fell upon his face.  He wore a peasant’s blouse.  It seemed to her a face she knew.  Possibly she had passed him in the village street and had looked at him without remembering.  It was his eyes that for long years afterwards still haunted her.  She did not notice at the time what language he was speaking.  But there were none who did not understand him.