January 30. They have relented. They have shortened my stay. I am to be let out tomorrow, but I must _reposer_ a few days before going back to work. Bother! I haven’t heard anything from Bourmont for ten days and I am full of uneasy apprehensions. Since I have been in the hospital the cyclamen has been the only word I have had from the outside world. I have been cut off as completely as if I were in a tomb. Ah well, some day I’ll get back to the hut again I suppose, and when I do, if those boys aren’t almost half as glad to see me as I am to see them, why I’ll know that some other canteen lady has been surreptitiously stealing their affections, and I shall put poison in her soup. Hôpital Claude-Bernard Paris, January 31. I have been in a big air raid; this is just how it all happened: It was a white night in the hospital for me. I had lain for hours, it seemed, in the little blue room watching through the glass panes of my door the coiffed head of a young _infirmière_ bent over her embroidery. She sat outside my door because there was a light in the hall just there. Suddenly my drowsy ears were pierced by a long weird hoot. In an instant the girl had leaped to her feet and switched off the light, then she turned and ran down the hall. A moment later and the building was in darkness. I jumped from my bed and ran to the window. The light in front of the munitions factory was out, there seemed an uncanny silence, the machinery had been stopped. I hurried to the door. The corridor was full of hastening forms, _infirmières_, their loose white robes showing dimly in the grey light. “_Qu’est ce qui arrive?_” I demanded. “_Les Boches!_” The night nurse was peering from my window. “It’s the first warning,” she whispered. “See! the lights of Paris still shine.” But even as we looked, the light across the sky that was Paris flickered, dimmed, flashed out. At the same moment two great golden stars rose over the munitions factory. “_Les avions!_” cried the night nurse. And all the time the sirens kept up their ghostly wailing, like nothing one could imagine except a vast host of lost souls. Then the guns began. A moment later a crashing thud told that a bomb had fallen in our neighborhood. The night nurse drew me hurriedly into the hall. “Lie down against the wall,—close—like this,” she ordered. Up and down the corridor every space by the wall was occupied by the huddled form of an _infirmière_ buried beneath a mattress. The night nurse, who had a whole heap of mattresses to herself, pushed one across to me. I lay on the top, finding it more comfortable that way.