He had taken a train to Verdun and had arrived in front of the ruins of what had once been a beautiful city still under reconstruction after being razed to the ground at the end of the Great War. Francois asked at the military offices where the wounded had been taken back in those days. They had told him that the entire city had been a makeshift hospital. Later, he learned that many of the British soldiers had been taken to a baroque-style country maison outside the city.
He went to the address but only found a young couple there having lunch in the garden. They told him that very few sick people had stayed there and that after one particular bombardment they had been transferred to the Convent of the Bethlehem Sisters located in a town six miles away.
At the makeshift hospitals, any per
