Thinking it quite “in the note,” we went up-stairs again. He unlocked the door of a large corner room. At a table by a window looking out on another little tree-planted court was the young eaglet with fractured “wing”—arm and shoulder—in plaster. He got up with the military salute as we came in. I begged permission to address him in German, and when I asked him where he was _zu Hause_, he answered, “Posen,” and that it was far. He said he was very comfortable, but, with a longing glance at the patch of sky, added that he was dreadfully bored. I suppose he was, after being a bird in the blue ether and breaking into secular silences. He had been there a month, but was still very thin under the cheek-bones and dark about the eyes, and very young. He turned to the doctor with an entirely different expression—a sort of shutting down of iron shutters over the youthful look—on being asked in German if he had all he needed. “Why have I had no answer to the post-cards I have written my mother?” he asked, adding, “we also have mothers.” The _médecin-chef_ said: “You know you can only write once a month; but write another, all the same, and I will see it is sent off.” He had a worn French grammar on the table and had been diligently studying verbs when we entered. The doctor was _so_ nice with him. There is no bitterness at the front; the more one sees of it the more one realizes that bitterness is the special prerogative of non-combatants far from the field. I heard an American woman say to an officer just back from the front, so newly back that “the look” was still in his eyes: “I’d like to see you at Cologne, destroying the cathedral. It would serve the Boches right.” He looked at her and made answer: “_Ce n’est pas comme ça, madame_. Enough has been destroyed in the world. Think rather of reconstruction.” Ah! _les civils!_ Coming out, we met Mlle. des Garets and went with her to her evacuation hospital near the station, which was a triumph of turning heterogeneous spaces into a single purpose. Two old railway sheds had been converted into receiving-rooms, douche-rooms, refectories, and several eighteenth-century cellars had been so arranged that in case of bombardment they could stow away fifteen hundred wounded. This seems a simple enough statement, but just think what stowing away, _suddenly_, fifteen hundred wounded means! Mlle, des Garets, a daughter of General des Garets, has been marvelous in her devotion and practicality since the beginning of the war. I hear the motor-horn.... CHAPTER VI GERBÉVILLER AND LA SŒUR JULIE