Page:My Double Life — Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt.djvu/213

Rh Georges Boyer, who at that time was a young journalist, came to call on me at the ambulance, and I told him about the terrifying splendours of the night.

"Oh, how much I should like to see all that!" he said.

"Come this evening, towards nine or ten o'clock, and you will see," I replied.

We spent several hours at the little round window of my dressing-room, which looked out towards Chatillon. It was from there that the Germans fired the most.

We listened, in the silence of the night, to the muffled sounds coming from yonder; there would be a light, a formidable noise in the distance, and the bomb arrived, falling in front of us or behind, bursting either in the air or on reaching its goal. Once we had only just time to draw back quickly, and even then the disturbance in the atmosphere affected us so violently that for a second we were under the impression that we had been struck.

The shell had fallen just underneath my dressing-room. grazing the cornice, which it dragged down in its fall to the ground, where it burst feebly. But what was our amazement to see a little crowd of children swoop down on the burning pieces, just like a lot of sparrows on fresh manure when the carriage has passed! The little vagabonds were quarrelling over the débris of these engines of warfare. I wondered what they could possibly do with them.

"Oh, there is not much mystery about it," said Boyer; "these little starving urchins will sell them."

This proved to be true. One of the men attendants, whom I sent to find out, brought back with him a child of about ten years old.

"What are you going to do with that, my little man?" I asked him, picking up the piece of shell, which was warm and still dangerous, on the edge where it had burst.

"I am going to sell it," he replied.

"What for?"

"To buy my turn in the queue when the meat is being distributed."

"But you risk your life, my poor child. Sometimes the shells come quickly, one after the other. Where were you when this one fell?"

"Lying down on the stone of the wall that supports the iron