“Thank you,” she answered.  “He would think it kind of you, I know.”

She had the feeling that he was being borne by comrades.

CHAPTER XVII

It was from a small operating hospital in a village of the Argonne that she first saw the war with her own eyes.

Her father had wished her to go.  Arthur’s death had stirred in him the old Puritan blood with its record of long battle for liberty of conscience.  If war claimed to be master of a man’s soul, then the new warfare must be against war.  He remembered the saying of a Frenchwoman who had been through the Franco-Prussian war.  Joan, on her return from Paris some years before, had told him of her, repeating her words:  “But, of course, it would not do to tell the truth,” the old lady had said, “or we should have our children growing up to hate war.”

“I’ll be lonely and anxious till you come back,” he said.  “But that will have to be my part of the fight.”

She had written to Folk.  No female nurses were supposed to be allowed within the battle zone; but under pressure of shortage the French staff were relaxing the rule, and Folk had pledged himself to her discretion.  “I am not doing you any kindness,” he had written.  “You will have to share the common hardships and privations, and the danger is real.  If I didn’t feel instinctively that underneath your mask of sweet reasonableness you are one of the most obstinate young women God ever made, and that without me you would probably get yourself into a still worse hole, I’d have refused.”  And then followed a list of the things she was to be sure to take with her, including a pound or two of Keating’s insect powder, and a hint that it might save her trouble, if she had her hair cut short.

There was but one other woman at the hospital.  It had been a farmhouse.  The man and both sons had been killed during the first year of the war, and the woman had asked to be allowed to stay on.  Her name was Madame Lelanne.  She was useful by reason of her great physical strength.  She could take up a man as he lay and carry him on her outstretched arms.  It was an expressionless face, with dull, slow-moving eyes that never changed.  She and Joan shared a small grenier in one of the barns.  Joan had brought with her a camp bedstead; but the woman, wrapping a blanket round her, would creep into a hole she had made for herself among the hay.  She never took off her clothes, except the great wooden-soled boots, so far as Joan could discover.

The medical staff consisted of a Dr. Poujoulet and two assistants.  The authorities were always promising to send him more help, but it never arrived.  One of the assistants, a Monsieur Dubos, a little man with a remarkably big beard, was a chemist, who, at the outbreak of the war, had been on the verge, as he made sure, of an important discovery in connection with colour photography.  Almost the first question