They had abandoned
their quaint and beautiful habit for the ugly dress of the French
provinces--odd little bonnets that sat grotesquely on the tops of
their heads, stuffy black dresses, black cotton gloves. They would
like to be useful, but they belonged to the old regime.
Under their bonnets their faces were placid, but their eyes were sad.
Their schoolrooms are hospital wards, the tiny chapel is piled high
with supplies; in the refectory, where decorous rows of small girls
were wont to file in to the convent meals, unthinkable horrors of
operations go on all day and far into the night. The Hall of the Holy
Rosary is a convalescent room, where soldiers smoke and play at cards.
The Room of the Holy Angels contains a steriliser. Through the
corridors that once re-echoed to the soft padding of their felt shoes
brisk English nurses pass with a rustle of skirts.
Even the cross by which they lived has turned red, the colour of
blood.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE LOSING GAME
I saw a typhoid hospital in charge of two women doctors. It was
undermanned. There were not enough nurses, not enough orderlies.
One of the women physicians had served through the Balkan war.
"There was typhoid there," she said, "but nothing to compare with this
in malignancy. Nearly all the cases have come from one part of
Belgium.
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