Above all, blood,
blood, blood. She believed she should smell it as long as she lived. She
knew it in every stage from the fresh dripping blood of men rushed from the
field to the evacuation hospitals, to the black caked and stinking blood
of men rescued from No Man's Land endless days and nights after they had
fallen.
All that was elementary in her strong nature, inherited from strong,
full-blooded, often reckless and ruthless men, gradually welled to the
surface. She was possessed by a savage desire for life, a bitter inordinate
passion for life. Why not, when life might be extinguished at any moment?
What was there in life but life? Farcical that anything else could ever
have mattered.
Civilization--by which men meant the varied and pleasant times of
peace--seemed incredibly insipid and out of date. It had no more relation
to this war-zone than her youth to this swift and terrible maturity.
She was in many hospitals--rushed where an indomitable and tireless
auxiliary nurse was most in demand--some under the direction of the
noblesse division of the Red Cross, others under the bourgeois; and in more
than one were English and American girls, long resident in France, or, in
the latter case, come from America like herself to serve the country
for which they had a romantic passion. The majority, of course, were
Frenchwomen, young (in their first freedom), middle-aged, elderly.
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