Sometimes there was not quite so much fun in the situation. The girls who ran the Red Cross hut in the tuberculosis hospital of the Savenay group, almost directly across the highroad from Number 69, had a far weightier problem upon their shoulders. To amuse there, was a vastly more difficult task. For they knew--as most of its patients knew--that the man who entered the portals of that particular hospital was foredoomed. If he had a fighting chance of conquering the "T. B." he was packed into the hospital ward of a transport and rushed home. If he did not have that fighting chance--well, why waste precious transport space? To Savenay with him. And to Savenay he went to spend his days--and end them--in a cheery, camplike place where there were croquet and less strenuous games and broad piazzas that looked down across the valley toward the embouchure of the Loire, while Red Cross girls came and went and did their womanly best to comfort and amuse a fellow--and make him forget; forget the back door of the little hospital where, night after night, four or five fellows went out--in pine boxes, never to return, and the rows of wooden crosses down in the American cemetery at the foot of the hill steadily grew.
Turn back with me, if you will, inland from Savenay to the curved streets of Vichy--little Vichy situated in the very foothills of the high Alps. It is January now, not April. We have turned backward in full earnest, and are breathing the air of those hard weeks and months that followed immediately upon the signing of the armistice.
Vichy, in its very compactness, with the flat yellows of its curious old buildings and its equally curious modern hotels, with the fifteenth-century tower in the background and the quiet River Allier slipping by, has the fascinating unreality of a stage setting--one of those marvelous effects with which the genius of a Belasco or a Joseph Urban from time to time delights in dazzling us. In spring or in summer we might find it prepared for carnival--with green-painted chairs and tables underneath the still greener foliage of its small park. But this is January and the park is deeply blanketed in snow. In such a serene midwinter setting it seems far more ready for silent drama than for the blare of carnival--the figures in olive drab are indeed quite the figures of pantomime--brown against the whiteness of the snow. The only touches of color in the picture--tiny splotches of green or blue or purple or yellow--are supplied by the tiny cloth bags that the men carry with them. They are preparing to entrain--the first step of many on the way back to the homeland--and the vari-colored bags, each marked with a crimson cross, are the comfort kits they genuinely cherish.