Marins pay back in friendship. The Red Cross station to which we
reported, Poste de Secours des Marins, was conducted by Monsieur le
Docteur Rolland, and Monsieur Le Doze. Our workers were standing guests
at their officers' mess. The little sawed-off sailor in the Villa Marie
where I was billetted made coffee for two of us each morning.
Our friends have the faults of young men, flushed with life. They are
scornful of feeble folk, of men who grow tired, who think twice before
dying. They laugh at middle age. The sentries amuse them, the elderly
chaps who duck into their caves when a few shells are sailing overhead.
They have no charity for frail nerves. They hate races who don't rally
to a man when the enemy is hitting the trail. They must wait for age to
gain pity, and the Bretons will never grow old. They are killed too
fast. And yet, as soon as I say that, I remember their rough pity for
their hurt comrades. They are as busy as a hospital nurse in laying a
blanket and swinging the stretcher for one of their own who has been
"pinked." They have a hovering concern. I have had twenty come to the
ambulance to help shove in a "blesse," and say good-by to him, and wave
to him as long as the road left him in their sight. The wounded man,
unless his back bound him down, would lift his head from the stretcher,
to give back their greetings. It was an eager exchange between the whole
men and the injured one.
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