CHAPTER XII
Themédecin majorhimself had hurried to the front and was going through the wards and asking questions when Belinda arrived at the hospital.
The battle had opened unexpectedly, and no time had been given to weed out thoseblesséswho were convalescent. More wounded would be coming in hourly, and now all that could be done was to send those patients that might be moved with any degree of safety to the base hospitals.
That meant transferring them by ambulance to the town where atrain sanitairewould take them to the extreme rear. It was known thepostes desecourswere overflowing and that all the wounded—some of them Germans—had not been removed from the ground between the two lines of trenches.
There had been charging and counter-charging across this No-Man's-Land and the Red Cross men at the battle line made no distinction between fallen enemy and fallen friend.
So Belinda saw all but six of her old patients sent away before noon. Gaston actually wept and kissed her hands at parting. Even grouchy Marius expressed his good wishes for her future—of course, in his own peculiar way.
"The dogs that follow us, Mademoiselle, can be no worse than the dogs who leave.Mon Dieu!No!"
In spite of these removals, this proved to be a trying day for the young Red Cross nurse. There were three deaths among theopérésbefore night. Themédecin chefhimself came, at her report, to see what was the matter. There were four others for whom she had fears—grands blessésall.
Belinda had no desire to make a record in healing the wounded who came to her ward. Of course, it was very fine ifMadame la Directricecould report to headquarters that so manyblesséspassed through her hospital and that of them all only a small number were lost. But to Belinda mere figures entered very slightly into the work.
Her humane instincts revolted from looking at the work as "the job." To "make a record" was farthest from her thoughts.
She was only desirous each day of making those under her care as comfortable as possible; to ease pain where it was being suffered so bravely; to cheer the hours of these men who had done their duty at the front and were now doing their duty here on the hospital cots.
They were all brave fellows—even those who were the very hardest to handle. During the interval before this last battle commenced the general had come through the ward and pinned theMédaille Militaireover the hearts of some of her worst patients for acts of bravery performed on the field. Even upon the egg-stained nightshirt of Marius the medal had been pinned.
The girl from America saw and appreciated the human side of this tragedy too much to be finally successful as a nurse in a war hospital. She realized this fact quite keenly, but she had no idea of asking to be relieved.
She knew she had made her charges happier—more cheerful—more comfortable. Whatever the work might take out of her, she had helped them all. Those who were removed loved her. The spoken blessings of some of them rang in her ears. The kisses of the courteous Gaston on her hands were still warm. Even the eyes of Marius as he was taken out assured her that he never would forget her.
"It is worth while. It is worth the sacrifice of self," Belinda thought as, with the ward finally cleared up again, she waited for the fresh accession of wounded.
Suddenly there was a call for her outside. The great guns had been silent all day, and since the visit of themédecin majormore wounded had been taken away than had been brought in. But now the ambulances were rolling in again from the front. During the lull the wounded were being picked up from the fields between the lines—some of them having lain there in the rain and cold for thirty-six hours.
Madame la Directrice, coming to Belinda's ward, said to the girl:
"You are familiar with German, are you not, Mademoiselle Melnotte?"
"I speak the language—yes, Madame," the girl replied.
"Take these men, then, toSalle III," ordered thedirectrice.
The men on the stretchers were prisoners. The gray-green uniforms—where the garments had not been stripped from the bodies—were unmistakable. The type of countenance as well was unmistakable.
In silence the German wounded were brought into the ward. They, too, were silent; even their groans were stifled as they lay shattered beside their enemies. If the French soldiers might have reviled them at another time, they did not do so now.
Thebrancardierslifted the broken bodies from the stretchers to Belinda's clean beds. Most of their foulness had been removed in the receiving ward. Yet the girl almost shrank from touching them.
In her heart was bitter resentment against these members of a race that had plunged the whole world into war. She could not forget the putrid, awful cases of gas gangrene which had been under her care, the results of a horrid and barbarous method of warfare utterly unknown in a presumably Christian world until the brains of Teutonic scientists had suggested it.
Other awful putrefactions and criminal mutilations had come under her eyes in this hospital, directly due to Prussian methods of warfare. She could not forget them; she could not escape their significance. To her these grim, wounded men brought in as prisoners did not seem at all like theblessésshe had been nursing. Pity excused none of their faults.
She dressed their wounds as carefully as she did those of her French patients. She listened to them, if they spoke, as patiently as to the others. Yet for that first day and the next her horror of these alien prisoners almost stifled her natural tenderness when she approached them.
Belinda had, during these weeks at the field hospital, become thoroughly imbued with the hatred of the French for their ancient enemies, and by their attitude toward them. She had listened to little but tales of the barbarisms of the detested "Boches." Her mind was filled with stories of rapine and vandalism on the part of the Prussian-baited German hordes.
Yet she was wise enough to hide these deeper feelings from the orderlies and stretcher-bearers, as well as from little Erard. The latter's fantastically expressed hatred of the enemy had been so frequently shown that Belinda feared an outbreak when he was called upon to help with these German wounded.
Nor was she wrong in this expectation. Only, the crooked little man's explosion of feeling was not just what the nurse had expected.
One of the strangers could keep nothing on his stomach at first, and, knowing little French, the poor fellow was slow in making his need of the basin understood by Erard.
"Ah, thesesales étrangers!" growled Erard. "Nom de Dieu!that I should serve thecochon! Why do they not let them die where they fall? Or stick them with the bayonet, as they do our poorpoiluswhen they have too many prisoners?"
Then suddenly he saw how pallid the man was and how he had fallen limply on his pillow.
"Ah, Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!" he called softly to Belinda. "Come quickly! What shall we do? This poor fellow is dying!"
And the two worked over the man an hour to save him once more from the grave.
At the end of the ward a delirious patient had been flung upon a cot. Had he not been so weak they must have strapped him down. From side to side he rolled his head. He was just a pretty, fair-haired boy—a mother's boy. And if that mother could have seen the poor, tortured limbs and the great shrapnel wound in his thigh!
Belinda went to his side no more frequently than she did to the others. Yet she was haunted by the suffering and by the youth of the lad. Once she lingered to lay a palm upon his pain-wrinkled, sweating brow.
"Ach, liebes Mütterlein! Mein Mütterlein!" he murmured, and somehow managed to seize the nurse's hand.
For ten minutes Belinda stood, until the weak fingers slipped from her hand and the boy slept. And what were her thoughts?
Not of the horrors of war. Not of the criminal practices of a blood-inflamed soldiery fighting for the already moribund issue of the Divine Right of Kings. Not of the wrongs of France.
She suddenly had a vision of a grassy lane, on either hand old but pleasant houses with red-tiled or thatched roofs, a rambling inn on one side, a footbridge over a stream at the end of the lane, and a gristmill with its babbling wheel.
Marching out of one dooryard into the lane defiled a phalanx of geese led by a high-headed old gander. The little girl, Belinda herself, in the short petticoats and with the plaits of hair down her back, who was standing in the lane was a stranger and she was afraid of that gander.
But here to her rescue came running two tow-headed lads—not older than herself, but braver. They were her defense and comfort.
Carl and Paul, her cousins! Somewhere they were fighting with the enemies of France! Or were they already shot down? And did they lie, like this poor lad, in some hospital at the mercy of strangers?
Another incident served to impress the girl's mind deeply. The battle had rumbled away along the front to other sectors. But the passing to and from the trenches of troops and the heavy rumbling of the wagons continued past the hospital, day and night.
The Flying Corps, too, was busy, and Belinda was not too much engaged with her own work to worry about Frank Sanderson. How did he fare? There were airplanes being shot down, she heard, every day above the trenches. If the aviators fell within the German lines they were seldom heard of again. They were considered spies, of course. And, then, there are few falls, whether in peace or war, of flying machines that do not compass the pilot's death.
Then one day there walked intoSalle IIItwo visitors—first a smart old man in a blue suit and with a broad smile upon his sea-bronzed countenance, and behind him Sanderson himself with a hamper on his arm.
"Captain Dexter!" cried the nurse, giving both her hands to the beaming shipmaster, but looking over his shoulder at Sanderson.
"What did I tell you?" demanded the Yankee captain of the aviator. "I told you she'd be tickled to death to see folks from home."
"Home?" repeated Belinda, a little startled by the thought of America being her home.
"By Hannah!" pursued the shipmaster. "Isn't she a regular Yankee girl? I'm proud of you young folks that have come over here to give these Johnny Crapauds a hand in their fight. I meet you everywhere I go about France—in the air, on the auto-busses—these jitneys as I'd call 'em at home—carryin' the wounded; and best of all in the hospitals. All of you doin' your 'bit,' as John Bull calls it. Well! Well! I told you, Frank, that she'd be glad to see us."
The nurse had given the young man her hand.
"And we haven't come empty-handed," went on Captain Dexter in his loud, cheerful tone. "Got something for your boys here——"
"They are mostly Germans now in this ward," Belinda interrupted. "Prisoners."
"By Hannah! That so?"
"The poor fellows!" Sanderson said. "We've got candy and cakes. The captain insisted they'd be appreciated by fellows who have to live mostly on broth," and he laughed.
There were other comforts, too, in the hamper. Some things the sight of which almost brought tears to the nurse's eyes, for there were not many luxuries seen in the wards. She noticed that the captain himself was surprised by some of the articles taken out of the hamper, and she believed the old man's thoughtfulness had not suggested all the comforts produced. Lastly came a quantity of cigarettes and tobacco, with pipes—the greatest boon possible to thoseblesséswho were convalescent.
Belinda watched, too, Sanderson's manner as he went down the ward distributing to the occupants of the cots such of the dainties as she said each might have. He could speak German with the same facility that he spoke French, and he was as cheerful and kindly to the Germans as to the few French left inSalle III.
Indeed, for the first time since the influx of prisoners a spirit of cheerfulness spread through the ward. Some of these silent, suffering prisoners, so far from their homes and with wearisome confinement facing them, actually smiled.
Sanderson discovered something that Belinda had not learned. One of the Germans—a man somewhat older than his fellows—could speak broken English.
"Wie geht es?You are from America, yet?" he said to Sanderson. "I lif' there, too."
"By Hannah!" roared Captain Dexter from the rear, "why didn't you stay there?"
"Yes, I wish I was back there alretty. But I haf' to fight for the Fatherland."
"A reservist," whispered Belinda. But she had not learned this about him before. She really had not felt interested enough in the bearded, silent man to talk much with him.
But Sanderson seemed interested in everybody in the ward and was immensely cheering. Jacob, as was the bearded man's name, told the young aviator he had a delicatessen store in New York, on the upper East Side.
"But, soh!" he blew a sigh. "I may never see it again."
The energetic Captain Dexter had to view the entire hospital, and went off with one of the visiting doctors for that purpose. It was being whispered about among the hospital attendants that the "so-rich" and benevolentAméricainwas about to furnish money for an entire hospital unit to theCroix Rouge.
"The skipper must be causing his three 'darters' a great deal of worry of mind just now," chuckled Sanderson, remaining with Belinda. "He's drawn on his bankers for so much money that, he tells me, Mesdames Prudence, Patience and Penelope tried to hold up the advances, thinking the poor old chap had gone quite off his head and had become demoralized by the wickedness and gaieties of Paris. They do not realize that Paris at present is about as lively as its namesake in Kentucky, U. S. A.!
"And what good the old gentleman manages to do with his money—my word! He spends it like a sailor ashore with his pay in his pocket. The other day I found him strapped—flat broke, and without enough to pay for his dinner. But it's worrying the three 'darters.'"
"They must be disturbed about him, I suppose," Belinda agreed. "And he's such a splendid, brave old man."
"He's the kind of American I'm proud of," the aviator said earnestly. "Perhaps he may be somewhat boastful, but in these days that has actually become a virtue. You must confess, Miss Melnotte, that we Americans have much to be proud of."
"Have we?" she retorted, smiling rather seriously. "I do not know—I am not sure that I may claim much part in America or things American."
"Ah!" he said, with quick understanding. "This work here has made you feel that your sympathies are all with your father's people?"
"It is so," she admitted.
"You lack the proper perspective—yet," he said, nodding. "But you will get it before long, I am sure. The skipper and I have an advantage over you, to be sure. But your country—America—will be in this war before long."
"God forbid!" she murmured.
"It cannot be helped. The autocratic government of Germany has gone mad with lust of blood and power. Before long," and he gestured toward the Stars and Stripes so brightly gleaming in her trophy of banners on the wall, "that flag will become the most beautiful thing you ever looked upon!"
"Oh, Mr. Sanderson!" she said deprecatingly. "You are over-enthusiastic. You seem so sure the United States will come in."
"As sure as I am of my own existence," he told her gravely. Then, in a suddenly altered tone, and speaking softly, he added: "I wish, indeed, I were as sure of something else."
"Yes?" she said, rather absently.
He rushed on boyishly, desperately:
"I wish I were sure of how you will feel about me after the war is over. Miss Melnotte—Belinda——"
"Mr. Sanderson!" she exclaimed, drawing away from him. "Surely you are forgetting yourself."
"Oh, Belinda——"
"If you have no regard for yourself—for your duty as a man," the girl cried hoarsely, "show some compassion for me."
"But, Belinda, listen! I tell you——"
"You may tell me nothing! Nothing! You have no right to speak to me in this way."
"You—you forbid me?" he stammered, gazing at her with a hurt expression. Her eyes were aflame, her cheeks hot with anger. Yet she trembled through all her frame. "Do you mean this?" he went on slowly.
"Certainly I mean it," she declared fiercely. "Never speak in this vein again. If you do I must forget that we are even acquaintances, Mr. Sanderson."
The return of Captain Dexter made further speech between them impossible. Belinda would not even take Sanderson's hand when the visitors departed.