Day broke, and the men still passed on, always as dusty, always as tired, all regiments, all arms mixed in confusion. We did our best to relieve as many as we could. In the morning the crowd grew thinner; we saw only stragglers and cripples. How many we took in to comfort and nurse I cannot say; they were too many. I remember the clerk of the telegraph pointing to his right hand, of which the fingers had been shot off. "What shall I do now?" he said. "And the girl I am engaged to, will she marry me?" "Of course she will, or she would not be French!" And then came a soldier wounded in the leg, and, in spite of his sufferings, he hobbled on with a stick. In admiration, he indicated Antoinette with a movement of his chin, and declared in his Lorraine brogue: "That girl there, she has dressed my wound much better than a trained nurse." A little linesman moved our pity still more, and even now we cannot talk of him without emotion. He was very young, with a childish face; his motionless features expressed an immense stupor, a grievous surprise. What! that war! That was war! This wonderful thing we had so often heard of! It was this retreat, these toils, these sufferings! For three weeks he had not taken off his shoes, and his blistered feet were so swollen that the poor fellow could hardly walk. Geneviève washed his poor feet, and Colette, the over-fastidious Colette, wiped and bound them up with tender care. We got him fresh socks, and the little foot soldier, after a comfortable breakfast, went on his way again. As he left us, he looked around him with amazement depicted on his face, and said: "The Germans will punish you for that." In these busy hours we had many opportunities to wonder at the energy and vitality of our race. As soon as the soldiers, spent with fatigue and disheartened, had rested a bit and swallowed something hot, they renewed their vigour and even recovered gaiety enough to tell us their adventures, to laugh at the German shells, which often do not burst, and whose fragments run over the cloth of their uniforms, they assured us, without doing any harm. "But"--and there they dropped their voices to a whisper--"we have been beaten, because there are traitors among the generals...." This opinion drove us to despair. We did not give credit to it, but what would happen if the men reposed no trust in their chiefs? And what could we answer to the poor fellows? I recalled to Geneviève's memory Captain Vinchamps' saying: "Beaten soldiers always call out treason, and they are not wrong; a traitor is not merely a man who basely and selfishly sells his country; he is a traitor too when he is not equal to his duty."