No, my dears, it's we make the wars. You
and me, my dears."
There came a day in early spring. All night long the guns had never
ceased. It sounded like the tireless barking of ten thousand giant dogs.
Behind the hills, the whole horizon, like a fiery circle, was ringed with
flashing light. Shapeless forms, bent beneath burdens, passed in endless
procession through the village. Masses of rushing men swept like shadowy
phantoms through the fitfully-illumined darkness. Beneath that
everlasting barking, Joan would hear, now the piercing wail of a child;
now a clap of thunder that for the moment would drown all other sounds,
followed by a faint, low, rumbling crash, like the shooting of coals into
a cellar. The wounded on their beds lay with wide-open, terrified eyes,
moving feverishly from side to side.
At dawn the order came that the hospital was to be evacuated. The
ambulances were already waiting in the street. Joan flew up the ladder
to her loft, the other side of the yard. Madame Lelanne was already
there. She had thrown a few things into a bundle, and her foot was again
upon the ladder, when it seemed to her that someone struck her, hurling
her back upon the floor, and the house the other side of the yard rose up
into the air, and then fell quite slowly, and a cloud of dust hid it from
her sight.
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