In the morning, our attendant, good-natured fellow as he was, brought us, with a few of his coarse jokes, a quart of very hot black coffee. Then the doctor appeared and almost immediately went into a little room close to the garage where he could see his patients successively. One after another we passed into that little room, carried in on a stretcher by two attendants. Already there was camaraderie amongst us, and we chaffed him who was about to enter, pretending to believe he would cry out under the doctor’s scalpel. Thus it was a point of honour with each of us not to utter a sound while our flesh was probed and our blood ran. The exit of the Frenchman who was to pass first “on the billiard-table,” as they say among the “Poilus,” made a sensation. The Germans pretended to groan, to cry, to call out “Mamma.” But they were disappointed. The French determined not to utter a sound. With sweating brow and teeth clenched on the cloth of the stretcher, they gave themselves with courage, even with stoicism, to the operation. They proved that, although vanquished, they were men and knew how to endure suffering. In their turn they might have made fun of the Germans who returned almost fainting with pain; but we showed them that we French did not take pleasure from such sources as the Boches did, and that suffering, especially the suffering of an enemy, was, with us, no subject for derision. I remember that I scored a success, completely unexpected but well deserved, I must confess. When, after the operation, I was brought back dressed in a woman’s smock of fine cambric, even I found myself such a comical figure that, forgetting the knife that I had just experienced, I joined in the laughter with the others. Owing to the weakened condition in which we were, the hours which followed passed in semi-torpor, a torpor disturbed at times by sharp jars of pain, physical or mental. * * * * * Some days later I was sent to the general hospital to wait for a motor ambulance.