We arrived at the general hospital where nobody was expecting us. It was a mess. We didn’t know where the injured were supposed to go. We didn’t know where to go ourselves. Eventually we were taken to a small room where we were able to deploy stretchers for wounded ones.
We met M. Langlois, the hospital director, in his combat uniform. He bought us in a large room where articles form museums; statues were sheltered. We made up our beds there. The morning after, we had to be on duty. With Herbine, I have been affected to the general hospital. There, we found a disaster.
For the past 3 days, nobody had changed bandages. The smell was horrible. A huge number of wounded had arrived from Caen. Some were also sick, they needed sulfamide, some other were dehydrated to death…but they had been given nothing. It was the same at Robert Lion’s hospital. WE actually went there to check on our soldiers we had brought with us from Caen as we wanted to know what had happened to them after the dispatches.
There were so many things to do. Sometime we couldn’t stand washing bandages while soldiers were dying but it was a necessary task.
The day after I was already transferred to the Letot School while Herbine had to go back to Caen.


Letot school was ridiculously small with very simple equipment. There was only Mrs. Anfrye with her two kids (her daughter Monique and her son Jean-Claude) with M. Angerard who was helping around. Being very nice, Monique and Nicole Lebailly would come to read the news reports to all wounded people. Jean-Claude was sometime reading the mass in Latin, from the staircase.
The school was cut in half. In the first (left) building, the old canteen was for men, right side, classrooms, for women.
On the yard, there were ruins of a building, probably classrooms as I could see some blackboards on the first floor. There were 3 rooms left on the ground floor that was used for men and women.
In the garden, a greenhouse, where we would also pout some wounded people. In the end, we could take care of many people there.


We had named each room after county names! First floor: Corsica with 4 amputated people. A 10 years old boy: Roger with all remaining extremities in plaster, and on the other side in the convalescence room M. Davy from Caen, M. Glasson and M. Matiére from Fleury-sur-Orne.
In the first floor room below, there was much more people, all women. I especially remember that mother with her 7 years old daughter who had both been burnt by German using a flamethrower on them while they were on their way back from milking the cows.