ing
them with their plates and dishes they will be wounded, and more
severely, in their honour.

We converse.

It is in conversation that they are most adorable. They gaze at you with
candid, innocent eyes; not a quiver of a lip or an eyelash betrays to
you the outrageous quality of your French. The behaviour of your
sentences would cause a scandal in a private boarding school for young
ladies, it is so fantastically incorrect. But Max and Jean receive each
phrase with an imperturbable and charming gravity. By the subtlest
suggestion of manner they assure you that you speak with fluency and
distinction, that yours is a very perfect French. Only their severe
attentiveness warns you of the strain you are putting on them.

Max lingered long after Jean had departed to his kitchen. And presently
he gave up his secret. He is a student, and they took him from his
College (his course unfinished) to fight for his country. When the War
broke out his mother went mad with the horror of it. He told me this
quite simply, as if he were relating a common incident of war-time.
Then, with a little air of mystery, he signed to me to follow him along
the corridor. He stopped at a closed door and showed me a name inscribed
in thick ornamental Gothic characters on a card tacked to the panel:

Prosper Panne.

Max is not his real name. It is the name that Prosper Panne has taken to
disguise himself while he is a servant. Prosper Panne--_il est ecrivain,
journaliste_. He writes for the Paris papers. He looked at me with his
amazed, pathetic eyes, and pointed with a finger to his breast to
assure me that he is he, Prosper Panne.

And in the end I asked him whether it would bore the wounded frightfully
if I took them some cigarettes? (I laid in cigarettes this morning as a
provision for this desolate afternoon.)

And--dear Prosper Panne--so thoroughly did he understand my malady, that
he himself escorted me. It is as if he knew the _peur sacre_ that
restrains me from flinging myself into the presence of the wounded.
Soft-footed and graceful, turning now and then with his instinct of
protection, the orderly glides before me, smoothing the way between my
shyness and this dreaded majesty of suffering.

I followed him (with my cigarettes in my hand and my heart in my mouth)
into the big ward on the ground floor.

I don't want to describe that ward, or the effect of those rows upon
rows of beds, those rows upon rows of bound and bandage