to do anything to help, no
matter what, that she was soon put in charge of the wounded on trains.
After many trips, during which she showed her uncommon talent for
soothing the wounded, making them comfortable even when they were
packed like sardines on the floor, and bringing always some sort of
order out of the chaos of those first days, she was invited to take
hold of the problem of Val de Grace.

She had solved it when I paid my visit with Madame Goujon. She not
only had replaced all the men nurses and attendants with women but was
training others and sending them off to military hospitals suffering
from the same sudden depletions as Val de Grace. She also told me that
three women do the work of six men formerly employed, and that they
finished before ten in the morning, whereas the men never finished.
The hospital when she arrived had been in a condition such as men
might tolerate but certainly no woman. I walked through its weary
miles (barring the tuberculosis wards) and I never saw a hospital look
more sanitarily span.

But the kitchen was the show place of Val de Grace, little as the
women hard at work suspected it. Where Madame Olivier found those
giantesses I cannot imagine; certainly not in a day. She must have
sifted France for them. They looked like peasant women and no doubt
they were. Only the soil could produce such powerful cart-horse
females. And only such cart-horses could have cooked in the great
kitchen of Val de Grace. On a high range that ran the length of the
room were copper pots as large as vats, full of stew, and these the
Brobdinagians stirred with wooden implements that appeared to my
shattered senses as large as spades. No doubt they were of inferior
dimensions, but even so they were formidable. How those women stirred
and stirred those steaming messes! I never shall forget it. And they
could also move those huge pots about, those terrible females. I
thought of the French Revolution.

Madame Olivier, ruling all this force, giantesses included, with a rod
of iron, stood there in the entrance of the immaculate kitchen looking
dainty and out of place, with her thin proud profile, her clear dark
skin, beautifully tinted in the cheeks, her seductive infirmiere
uniform. But she has accomplished one of the minor miracles of the
war.

I wonder if all these remarkable women of France will be decorated one
of these days? They have earned the highest _citations_, but perhaps
they have merely d