I study with emotion the admirable vision of the human soul which the Sister of Charity and the wounded soldier set before me. It is a vision which has intervened always, as with an element of the supernatural, in our war-time pictures, and, behold, now we find it again, almost miraculously, in the supreme struggle of 1914. Sister Gabrielle, who has charge of my room, her identity quite hidden as it is by her archangel's name, is the daughter of a general, as I know. She has three brothers that have served beneath the colours. The oldest, a quite young captain, has just met his death on the field of honour. I happen to have learned the circumstances: how, covered with blood already flowing from three different wounds, Captain X nevertheless struggled on bravely at the head of his men, and after several hours of conflict was struck by a bullet full in the breast. He fell, crying: "Don't fall back! That's my last order!" Sister Gabrielle was told only last week of the glorious grief that had been thrust upon her, but no one around her would have guessed her sorrow. Possibly her smile for the patients that day was a little more compassionate and tender than usual, when she thought of her brother enduring his moment of supreme agony alone down there in the forests of the Vosges.... She is thin and frail--mortally ill herself, they say; she was quite ill one month ago. But if you speak to her of her health she interrupts you a little impatiently: "We have given ourselves, body and soul, according to our vows. To last a little longer or a little less doesn't matter. The main thing is to fulfill our tasks. Besides," she adds, indicating her patients, "they have given their lives for France. It is quite right, if it must be so, that our lives be sacrificed to save them."... In the lot of wounded that were sent in yesterday, forty came to Sister Gabrielle directly from the Aisne. They arrived toward the close of the day, and I shall never forget the spectacle of that room. One stretcher succeeded another, all borne slowly by the litter-men and set down near the hastily prepared beds. Here and there you caught a cry of pain that could not be kept in, though there were no complaints, no continued groanings. Yet now, when you lean over those glorious and lamentable blue bonnets, cut as they are by bullets and stained with the mud of the trenches, when you take off the caps that have grown stiff with the dampness of the long rains, you perceive their suffering by the glittering look in their fevered eyes, their poor, worn faces and ravaged features, sunken and hollow with suffering. Then, all at once, at the least word, the old gallantry that we know so well reasserts itself. For example, they ask the most touching and childish favours of us. Thus if a limb that hurts too much must be lifted, or a piece of clothing that binds a wound eased up, they all ask: "Not the orderly, not the orderly, please! the Sister or the lady."