A principal subject of conversation between them at this time was the hospital, which Henriette never left except to come and cheer Jean with her company.  When she came in at evening he would question her, making the acquaintance of each of her charges, desirous to know who would die and who recover; while she, whose heart and soul were in her occupation, never wearied, but related the occurrences of the day in their minutest details.

“Ah,” she would always say, “the poor boys, the poor boys!”

It was not the ambulance of the battlefield, where the blood from the wounded came in a fresh, bright stream, where the flesh the surgeon’s knife cut into was firm and healthy; it was the decay and rottenness of the hospital, where the odor of fever and gangrene hung in the air, damp with the exhalations of the lingering convalescents and those who were dying by inches.  Doctor Dalichamp had had the greatest difficulty in procuring the necessary beds, sheets and pillows, and every day he had to accomplish miracles to keep his patients alive, to obtain for them bread, meat and desiccated vegetables, to say nothing of bandages, compresses and other appliances.  As the Prussian officers in charge of the military hospital in Sedan had refused him everything, even chloroform, he was accustomed to send to Belgium for what he required.  And yet he had made no discrimination between French and Germans; he was even then caring for a dozen Bavarian soldiers who had been brought in there from Bazeilles.  Those bitter adversaries who but a short time before had been trying to cut each other’s throat now lay side by side, their passions calmed by suffering.  And what abodes of distress and misery they were, those two long rooms in the old schoolhouse of Remilly, where, in the crude light that streamed through the tall windows, some thirty beds in each were arranged on either side of a narrow passage.

As late even as ten days after the battle wounded men had been discovered in obscure corners, where they had been overlooked, and brought in for treatment.  There were four who had crawled into a vacant house at Balan and remained there, without attendance, kept from starving in some way, no one could tell how, probably by the charity of some kind-hearted neighbor, and their wounds were alive with maggots; they were as dead men, their system poisoned by the corruption that exuded from their wounds.  There was a purulency, that nothing could check or overcome, that hovered over the rows of beds and emptied them.  As soon as the door was passed one’s nostrils were assailed by the odor of mortifying flesh.  From drains inserted in festering sores fetid matter trickled, drop by drop.  Oftentimes it became necessary to reopen old wounds in order to extract a fragment of bone that had been overlooked.  Then abscesses would form, to break out after an interval in some remote portion of the body.  Their strength all gone, reduced to skeletons, with ashen, clayey faces, the