very disfigured. I promised to show two men their faces tomorrow morning, I’ll let them borrow the mirror from my handbag. There’s a third one recovering who is disfigured, but blind—at least he won’t have to see his “broken face.” It’s late, I have to stop writing and seek a little strength in prayer.
Hail Mary, full of grace.
October 16, 1916
I am the bearer of bad news. I force myself to smile. They look at themselves in the mirror and they cry. One tried not to cry and started gallantly singing:
Farewell to life, farewell to love,
Farewell to all the girls,
but he burst into tears. I know this song, it continues with:
’Cause we’ve all been sentenced to die,
We’re the ones being sacrificed.
How can you accept not being able to recognize your own face? The worst thing is that most of them refuse the comfort of religion. They prefer to spend their time hiding away with bottles of alcohol. How those got here, I don’t know.
October 18
And they continue to suffer. By the time they get here from the front, their jawbones have started to grow back together, but so poorly that many have difficulty eating. For some, it even hurts to speak.
October 23, 1916
Mama and Thérèse left last Friday to spend a few days at our house in Normandy; they brought enough material to knit blankets for our poor heroes who are starting to get cold again, especially in the mud. It’s the start of the third winter of war.
As I’m alone at home, I worked on Saturday and Sunday (I even heard mass with the men), and I’m getting home later in the evenings.
Today, while bringing medicine to one of our patients, I heard the young man in the next bed over breathing strangely. This patient’s face is so badly damaged that he can only breathe through his mouth. I quickly understood at that point that he could no longer breathe at all. The cause was a hemorrhage that was filling his throat with blood. I lifted up his head and drew out as much blood as I could with a syringe.
Then I ran to find Doctor Debalme, who arrived a few minutes later. He wasn’t pleased that I hadn’t called him first; he told me rather firmly that I was only a nurse and it wasn’t up to me to decide if blood needs to be drawn out, since it’s a medical procedure.
October 24, 1916
Major de Brisson called me in this morning and congratulated me on saving the life of the young man with the hemorrhage. He said, “Marguerite, you saved him and you did well. Doctor Debalme would have arrived too late.”
The patient is an artillery lieutenant. He was really unlucky—it’s rare for an artilleryman to be wounded in the face. The majority of those whom we treat here served in the infantry, they’re the ones who charge out of the trenches and take the most hits.
Tuesday the 31st
This morning, I again had to show a truly disfigured young man his new face. He’s the one who had the hemorrhage last week. He still has his left eye, his left check, and a bit—a tiny bit—of his left jaw, his forehead, and his chin. There’s a big lock of hair on his right temple that is growing back red, like an extra scar in his brown hair. A single bullet managed to do all this damage. But it must be said that it was practically shot point blank.
He’s the first of my patients who didn’t cry at seeing his destroyed face. But he is very young, still a student.
I don’t dare write anything about him because he is a polytechnician like Robert. There has already been another mathematician in the unit. That one left blind a week ago; he told me he was going to do a dissertation on geometry. I thought of Robert. I wonder what he’s doing now; maybe he’s still in the infernal trenches. I continue mentioning him in my evening prayers.
We have taken back Douaumont.
My cousin Jacques was killed in Verdun.
We have never done so many operations in the unit as we did today.
November 8, 1916
This morning, I was taking off the polytechnician’s dressings so that he can undergo a bone graft (he already had a xenograft when he arrived; today they’re trying an autograft, using a fragment from one of his tibias), when he recited the following to me:
You’ll be a Man, my son!
He added that he really liked Kipling. I think I smiled, and then answered:
But I do not tremble in seeing my weakness.
He recognized it as one of Papa’s verses and said he really liked the poetry of Albert Janvier. I felt myself blush and said that the poet Albert Janvier was my father. Then I told him about how Papa died, the railroad accident, but I couldn’t talk for very long—they were taking him to the operating room and other unfortunate men were awaiting treatment.
I wonder if he has a fiancée. I think about all those girls whose lovers will return disfigured, and all those whose lovers will never return… I don’t know which will need more courage.
The worst will perhaps be for those who won’t know, because their men will have been declared missing.
November 14, 1916
Today, a surprise: Cousin Paul, dressed in full mourning attire, came to the unit. He had come to see a patient, and it was Lieutenant Mortsauf, my polytechnician! They spent the whole afternoon together, talking about mathematics. Paul had brought some books. I listened to their conversation while I was treating the others in the room—they were discussing things and writing formulas on sheets of paper that were then falling all around them onto the floor. When Paul left, I came over to remove the polytechnician’s stitches from his last operation. As I picked up the papers, he said, “So, Mademoiselle Marguerite, I take it you know Professor de Saint-Bonnet?” When I replied that he’s Mama’s cousin, he commended me. I told him that one of Paul’s sons had been killed in January and another last month, but he knew. He said that Paul was going to help him make use of his time at the hospital and that he was going to write a dissertation.
Friday, December 1st
As I move throughout the room, treating the other patients, I can see the polytechnician filling entire pages of his little yellow notebooks with calculations. Paul comes to see him two or three times a week. Sometimes he brings other mathematicians, and the patient always introduces me to them as “Mademoiselle Marguerite, the nurse who saved my life.” He tells me he owes his “second birth” to me. He explains his work to them; sometimes he tears sheets from his notebook and they take the papers with them. I don’t understand what they talk about, and besides, I don’t have time to listen, but I know that when they’re here, he smiles more. Even underneath the layers of gauze, I can discern a smile as soon as one is there. Today I heard them speaking in the stairwell as they were leaving.
Paul was crying and I could see his colleague had teary eyes. I know Paul was thinking about his two sons. Jacques, his
