A frightful moment!--the cowering patients--the officers in a state of
almost frenzied excitement, searching bed after bed. At the last bed,
occupied by a badly wounded and quite helpless youth, the officer
carrying the dagger brought the blade of it so near to the boy's throat
that Soeur Julie rushed forward, and placed her two hands in front of
the poor bare neck. The officer dropped both arms to his side, she said,
"as if he had been shot," and stood staring at her, quivering all over.
But from that moment she had conquered them.

For the German wounded, Soeur Julie declared she had done her best, and
the officer in charge of them afterwards wrote her a letter of thanks.
Then her mouth twisted a little. "But I wasn't--well, I didn't _spoil_
them! (_Je n'étais pas trop tendre_); I didn't give them our best wine!"
And one officer whose wounds she dressed, a Prussian colonel who never
deigned to speak to a Bavarian captain near him, was obliged to accept a
good many home truths from her. He was convinced that she would poison
his leg unless he put on the dressings himself. But he allowed her to
bandage him afterwards. During this operation--which she hinted she had
performed in a rather Spartan fashion!--"he whimpered all the time," and
she was able to give him a good deal of her mind on the war and the
behaviour of his troops. He and the others, she said, were always
talking about their Kaiser; "one might have thought they saw him sitting
on the clouds."

In two or three days the French returned victorious, to find the burnt
and outraged village. The Germans were forced, in their turn, to leave
some badly wounded men behind, and the French _poilus_ in their mingled
wrath and exultation could not resist, some of them, abusing the German
wounded through the windows of the hospital. But then, with a keen