“At last the night came when we lay outside Tourteron. Bertrand called for me and we bivouacked together. We were to attack some time before dawn, after the moon had set. We could not trust our tongues—at such times things are better left unsaid; so we lay and smoked and prayed against what we feared. Only once Bertrand spoke—‘François, to-morrow will see me always a devil or a saint, le bon Dieu knows which.'
“The moon shone bright till after midnight. We lay under cover of thin weeds, and beyond lay the meadow and stream and then the town. About twelve we heard the crisp bark of a sniper—two, three shots; then everything was still as death again. We were watching the shadows play across the meadow and timing the minutes before the moon would sink, when out of one of those shadows she came—straight across the meadow and the moonlight. It was Nanette, ma'am'selle. We knew it on the instant. She had a way of carrying the head and a step one could not forget. It was she the sniper had been after. One side of her facewas crimson, the other side white and beautiful. But she did not seem to know, and the first look I had told me she had gone quite mad.
“I could feel Bertrand Fauchet stiffen by my side; I could feel him reach out for my Rosalie and grip it fast. Then he began a low or crooning call. He dared not call out loud—he dared not move to give our troops away! It was to be a surprise attack. So all he could do was to wait and call softly as to a little child, ‘Nanette chérie, allons, allons!’
“There had been a skirmish in the meadow two days before; we had given way and the handful of dead we had left behind were still unburied. I think Nanette had heard that the Chasseurs Alpins had come and she had stolen out to find her lover. She came slowly, so slowly, and frail as a shadow herself. As she passed each corpse she knelt beside it and sang the foolish little berceuse that Poitou mothers sing to their babies. We could hear the humming far away, and as she came nearer we could hear the words. Ma’am’selle knows them, perhaps?
“‘Ah! Ah! papillon, marie-toi—Hélas, mon maître, je n’ai pas de quoi,La dans ma bergeri-eJ’ai cent moutons; ça s’ra pour faire les noces de papillon.’”
“The first look I had told me she had gone quite mad”
The soldier crooned the song through to himself as if under the spell of the story he was telling. Then he went on. “She sang it through each time, patting the blue coats, pushing back the caps of those who still wore them, looking hard into each dead face. But she would always turn away with the little shake of the head, so triste, ma’am’selle. And all the time the man beside me calling out his heart in a whisper—‘Nanette—Nanette—allons, chérie!’
“She was not twenty yards away, the arms of Bertrand Fauchet were reaching out to take her, when, pouf! the sniper barked again and Nanette went down like a pale cornflower before the reaper. And all the time we laid there, waiting for the moon to set. When we charge we charge like devils. We swept Tourteron clean of the Boches;and we take no prisoners!For that night every man remember the one thing, they love their captain and they see what he hasseen. But before the day is gone we are sane men again, all but our captain. The shell that takes my leg takes what pity, what softness he has left, and leaves him with just the frenzy to kill. And it is not for me to wonder—moi—for I know all.”
The story haunted Sheila for days; always when she closed her eyes she could see the girl Nanette coming across the meadow in the moonlight. She never failed to open them before she saw too far. The plaintive melody of the berceuse rang in her ears on duty and off, till at last she could stand it no longer. It was the old dominant Leerie who hunted up the chief.
“Colonel Sparks, I want you to put me on Captain Fauchet’s case. The work is lighter now; you can do with one less operating-room. I know it’s bad form to interfere, but I want my chance on that case.”
The chief looked his surprise. “I’ve heard of your fondness for breaking rules—wondered when you were going to begin. I don’t mind giving you up, but that case is hopeless. I’m sure of it. Listen—and this isn’t for publication—Fauchet got out of his ward again, hid in the corridors until the nurse wasgone, and killed another German last night. That man is incurably insane and we can’t keep him here any longer.”
“Please!” There was a look about Leerie that could not be denied, a compelling prayer for the right to save another human being. “You could keep him a little longer; I’ll promise there’ll be no more dead Germans. Give me my chance.”
“What’s your idea?”
The girl raised a deprecating hand. “Something so crazy that you’d laugh at it. Let me keep it to myself—and give me Captain Fauchet.”
In the end Leerie had her wish. The little room at the end of a ward, used heretofore for supplies, was turned into a private room, and Monsieur Satan was moved in, with Sheila O’Leary as guardian. It was very evident that the patient approved. Once the door was closed behind them, he beckoned the nurse to him with malignant joy.
“They are all Germans out there—I’ve just discovered it. Sooner or later they will all have to be destroyed. You are an American. I can swear to that, for I saw you on a liner coming from America and yourFrench is so bad, pardonnez-moi, it could not be anything but American. That is why I trust you. You are with me against the Boches, n’est-ce pas?”
Sheila solemnly agreed.
“Eh bien, listen. The world is slowly turning Boche. You pour a little Pinard into water and what do you get? Crimson! Well, you scatter a few Boches over the earth and what have you? A German world colored Prussian blue. Come closer, ma’am’selle.” He put out nervous hands and drew her down so he could whisper his words. “And the cure, ma’am’selle, the cure? Ah, moi, Monsieur Satan, knows it.”
They spent the rest of the day in discussing the killing qualities of shells, grenades, bombs; the stabbing qualities of bayonets, daggers, swords; the exploding properties of dynamite, nitroglycerin, TNT, and others. As they talked Monsieur Satan sucked in his breath exultantly and hissed between his teeth, “Zigouille, toujours zigouille!” while his hand stabbed and twisted into the air.
Another day and he had taken Sheila entirely into his confidence. “I have my mind made. You shall hear the cure,ma’am’selle, for you and I will be partners. A Boche world can be cured but the one way—destroyed, completely destroyed,” and he laughed uproariously. Then his eyes narrowed; he was all cunning and intensity, a beast of prey crouched for the spring. “Ah, but we must whisper; there are spies everywhere. The men in the wards are all spies pretending they are French wounded; and the doctors are spies. Oh, the Boches are damnably clever, but we will be more damnable—we will outwit them. We will blow them into a million atoms. They will make good fertilizer for French vineyards in a hundred years. Eh bien?”
So Sheila became partner in evolving the most colossal crime the world had ever known. Everything played into her hands and gave credence to her deceptions. The great cases that came by night packed with dressings were to Monsieur Satan air-bombs with propellers. They were to be set loose on the day appointed in such millions that the air would be charged with them, the sun blotted out; and they would drop in exploding masses over the earth, exterminating humanity.
“They shall be like the hordes of locusts that nearly destroyed Egypt—only these shall destroy. And how every one shall run in terror! You will see, ma’am’selle. It will be a good sight.” And Monsieur Satan rubbed his hands in keen anticipation.
The tanks of oxygen placed on motor-trucks, the gasoline-tanks, were nothing else than a deadly gas. The partners had concocted it out of the strangest compounds, unshed-tears, heart-agony, fear-in-the-night, snipers’ barks, and moonshine. Monsieur Satan chuckled over the formula and said he would swear not a living soul could withstand a single whiff of it. It was agreed that the makers of the gas—mythological beings Sheila had created—should be killed at once so that their secret should never be discovered; and Sheila herself was despatched to compass the deed. Before she returned the bell in the church near by was tolling for their parting souls; and Monsieur Satan chuckled as he cast admiring glances at this prompt executioner.
“You are a good pupil, ma’am’selle; you learn quickly. Now the maps.” And theyfell to diagraming where the piping for this deadly gas should be laid.
Not an inch of the old world was to be left peopled; from east to west and north to south everything was to be destroyed. No, not everything. Even as Monsieur Satan decreed it he hesitated. “There are the children, I think—yes, I think they shall live. Their hearts are pure; the Boches cannot contaminate them. They shall live after us with no memory of evil, so they can build again the beautiful world.” He stopped and looked across at the nurse with a haunting, wistful stare. “Tell me, ma’am’selle, was the world ever beautiful?”
“Very beautiful, capitaine.”
He passed an uncertain hand over his eyes. “I seem to remember that it was; but now I see it always running with red blood boiling from hell.”
After that the children were always in his mind; as he planned the destruction of the rest of the world he planned their re-creation. Thereupon Sheila saw to it that the war orphans from thecrêchecame to play in the hospital gardens—under the window of the little room. Soon it became a custom forMonsieur Satan to look for them, to ask their names, and wave gaily to them. And they waved back. And the chief of the surgical staff began to marvel that Monsieur Satan should give no more trouble.
Among them was a little girl, a wan, ethereal little creature who sat apart from the other children and watched their play with far-away, haunting eyes, as if she wondered what in the world they were doing. Sheila had found toys for her—a ball, a doll, a jumping-jack—and tried to coax her to play. But she only clung to them for their rare value as possessions; as a means to enjoyment they were quite meaningless. From one of the older children Sheila got her story. Her father had been killed, her mother was with the Boches; there was no one else. With an aching heart the nurse wondered how many thousand Madelines France held.
One day she brought the child in to Monsieur Satan and repeated her story. He listened wisely, patting her on the head, and then whispered to Sheila: “Ah, what did I say! These Boches—they get everything—the mothers, the sweethearts.” Then to Madeline: “Listen, ma pauvre; you shallhave the sadness no longer. Monsieur Satan will promise you happiness, ah, such happiness in the new beautiful world he is preparing for you. Now go. But ’sh ... sh! You must say nothing.”
From this moment Sheila became senior partner. It was she who suggested all the extraordinary horrors Monsieur Satan had overlooked. It was she who speeded up time and plans. “I have the hospitals and streets all mined in case the flying bombs should not come thick enough; and I have the wells poisoned. Isn’t that a clever idea?”
The man looked disturbed. “That’s as clever as the Boches. But the children—where will they drink? You must take care of the children.”
Then Sheila played her trump card and said the thing she had been waiting so long to say. Like Monsieur Satan she hissed the words between her teeth, while her face took on all the diabolical cunning it could muster. “The children—bah! What do they matter, after all? I have decided—the children shall be destroyed.”
Monsieur Satan sprang from his chair. He pinioned her arms behind her, forcing herback so he could look deep into her eyes with all the hate and mercilessness his soul harbored. “Touch Madeline—the children, never! Let so much as one little hair of their heads be harmed and I—Monsieur Satan—will kill you!”
She left him with a non-committal shrug, left him panting and swearing softly under his breath.
From that moment he watched Sheila suspiciously and followed the children with jealous eyes. For Madeline he called constantly; and she sat on his knee by the hour while he danced the jumping-jack outrageously and taught her to sing to the doll a certain foolish berceuse that Poitou mothers sing to their babies.
Sheila had planned to stage their day of destruction with the craft of a master manager. She had had to take certain officials into her confidence and get the chief to sign such orders as had never been issued in a hospital before. But in the end Fate staged it, and did it infinitely better than the nurse had even conceived it. The hour of doom struck a full half-day too soon—the children were playing in the gardens, under MonsieurSatan’s window instead of being in the cellar of thecrêcheas he had decreed; and Sheila was helping another head nurse do dressings in the ward outside.
There were only a few minutes after the siren blew before the first of the great Fokkers appeared over the city. Monsieur Satan’s mind went strangely blank; the children stopped their play and gaped stupidly into the sky; Sheila did nothing but listen. Then the bombs began to rain down on the city. The noise was terrific. The children ran aimlessly about, shrieking pitifully. It was this that set Monsieur Satan’s mind to working again. He broke out of the little room like the madman he was. He might have been Lucifer himself as he stumbled along on his bandaged foot, his hair erect, his eyes blazing a thousand inextinguishable fires. In the corridor he came upon Sheila, with other nurses and doctors, hurrying to gather in the out-of-door patients. As he overtook them a bomb struck the hospital.
“Sacrebleu!” he shouted. “You bungler! you fool of a destroyer! It was not the hour—and the children—First I go to save them. Afterward I come to kill you, ma’am’selle.”
He was out before them all, through the entrance and down the steps, when another bomb struck. The doorway and the pillars were crushed to gravel and Monsieur Satan was hurled headlong across the gardens. In an instant he was up, stumbling frantically toward the children, his arms outstretched in appealing vindication to those small, quivering faces turned to him in their hour of annihilation. “Mes enfants, have no fear. I come—I come.”
A third bomb fell. The children were tumbled in a heap like a pile of jackstraws. Monsieur Satan had time enough to see them go down before a fourth followed with the quick precision of an automatic. Yes, he saw; and in that horror-smiting moment believed it all a part of his great scheme of destruction; then the universe went to pieces about him and something crumbled inside his brain. He stood transfixed to the earth, staring helplessly in front of him, as immovable as a graven image.
It is one of the anomalies of war that the things that apparently destroy sometimes re-create. The gigantic impact of exploding masses may destroy a man’s hearing, hissight, his memory, or his mercy, and leave him thus maimed for all time. But it happens, sometimes, that the first shock is followed by another which restores with the suddenness of a miracle and makes the man whole again. That delicate bit of human mechanism which has been battered out of place is battered in, by the merest chance.
So it was with Monsieur Satan; and when Sheila and the chief found him he was rubbing his eyes as children will who wake and find themselves in strange places. He saw only the chief at first and tried to pull himself together.
“Ah, monsieur, I think some things have happened—but I cannot as yet make the full report. I am Bertrand Fauchet, Chasseur Alpin,” and he tried to click his bandaged heel against his shoe. Then he looked beyond and saw Sheila. It was as if he was seeing her for the first time since they had separated at the French quay. “Bon Dieu! It is Ma’am’selle O’Leary.” He held out a shaking hand. “We meet in the thick of war—is it not so?”
His eyes left Sheila and traveled apprehensively to the children. They werewriggling themselves free of one another; frightened and bruised, but not hurt, barring one. The smallest of them all lay on the outskirts of the heap, quite motionless.
“If you will permit,” Monsieur Satan stumbled on and gently picked up Madeline. He looked all compassion and bewilderment. “I do not altogether understand, ma’am’selle. But this little girl, I should like to carry her to some hospital and see that all is well with her. I seem to remember that she belongs to me.” He smiled apologetically at the two watching him, then stumbled ahead with his burden.
At the base hospital they gave Sheila O’Leary full credit for the curing of Bertrand Fauchet, which, of course, she flatly denied. She laid it entirely to the interference of Fate and a child. But the important thing is that Bertrand Fauchet left the hospital a sound man—and that Madeline went with him, each holding fast to the hand of the other.
“She is mine now,” he said, as he took leave of Sheila. “Le bon Dieu saw fit to send me in the place of that other papa. Eh, p’tite?” He stroked the hair back fromthe little face that looked worshipfully up at him. “It is for us who remember to make these little ones forget. N’est-ce pas, ma’am’selle? And we are going back to the world together, to find somewhere the happiness and the great love for Madeline. Adieu.”
Inthe American Military Hospital No. 10 one could always count on Ward 7-A beginning the day with a genuine fanfare of good spirits—that is to say, ever since that ward had acquired a distinction and personality of its own. On this particular morning the doors of the wards were open, for orderlies were scrubbing floors, and Sheila O’Leary in the operating-room above could catch the words of the third chorus that had rung through the hospital since the ban of silence had been raised.
“Gra-ma-cree ma-cruiskeen, Slainte-geal ma-vour-neen,Gra-ma-cree a-coolin bawn, bawn, bawn,Oh!”
As usual, Larry’s crescendo boomed in the lead. How those lads could sing!
In the regular order of things it was time for dressings; but the regular order of thingswas so often broken at No. 10 that it had nearly become a myth. The operating staff had been steadily at it since eleven the night before. If nothing more came in, they might be through by eleven now and the dressings come only two hours late. That would be rare good luck. Under the spell of the singing the tired backs of surgeons and nurses straightened unconsciously; cramped muscles seemed to lose some of their kinks; everybody smiled without knowing it—down to the last of the boys who were waiting their turn in the corridor outside. The boys had not been in the hospital long enough to know anything about Ward 7-A, but the challenge to courage and good spirits in that chorus of voices was too dominant to be denied, even among the sorest wounded of them. One after another rallied to it like veterans.
“Gra-ma-cree ma-cruiskeen bawn,” boomed Larry’s voice to the finish.
The chief of the Surgical Staff looked at Sheila as she handed him the sutures he was reaching for. “They’re the best we’ve had yet, eh? Not one with half a fighting chance, and just listen to the ones who are pulling through.”
“They’re Irish.” There was a tinge of pride in the nurse’s voice.
The chief smiled. “It’s like flipping a coin to find out whether you’re more Irish or American. Sometimes it’s heads, sometimes it’s tails. Which is it, honestly?”
“Honestly, both!” Sheila laughed softly. Then the door opened to admit the last of the stretchers, and she sobered for an instant until she saw the faces of the boys. She knew why they were smiling, and her eyes shone in the old luminous, Leerie fashion as she greeted them, each as if he had been an old friend.
“There’s a welcome for you. Those lads you hear have gone through what you are going through, only a lot worse. Listen, and think of that as you go under. They’ll be singing again in a moment.” And as she slipped the ether cone over the face of the first, up from Ward 7-A in rollicking cadences came another chorus:
“Wi’ me bundle on me shoulder, sure, there’s not a man that’s bolder—I am leavin’ dear old Ireland without warnin’.For I’ve lately took the notion for to cross the briny ocean,An’ I’m off for Philadelphia in the mornin’.”
The smile on the face of the first boy spread to a grin under its covering of gauze. “I’m off for Philadelphia, too,” he mumbled, thickly, and the eyes that looked into Sheila’s for a few last nebulous seconds showed all the comfortable security of a child’s.
They were hard at it for another hour, and while Sheila O’Leary’s hands flew from sterilizer to ether cone, from handing instruments and holding forceps to tying sutures and packing wounds, her mind was busy with something that lay far beyond. To this girl, who had come across to do her bit, life had become a jumble of paradoxes. She had come to give, out of the bounty of her skill and her womanhood; instead she had received far more abundantly from the largess of universal brotherhood and sacrifice. She had come to minister, and she had been ministered unto by every piece of human wreckage swept across the door-sill of the hospital. She had thought to dispense life, and to her ever-increasing wonder she had been given a life so boundless that it reached beyond all previous dreams of space or time. She was learning what thousands had been learning since the war began, those who hadthrown their fortunes into its crucible, and that is that if anything comes out at all, it comes out in the form of spirit and not of flesh.
Back in the old days at the sanitarium she had felt herself bound only to the problems and emergencies of war. It had never occurred to her then that in an incredibly short time she would be bothering about matters of adjustment afterward. With peace already on the horizon, she was troubled a hundredfold more than she had been when indefinite war was the promise for the future. From the beginning she had marveled at the buoyancy and optimism of the men who were focusing their lives within the limits of each day. Many of them never thought in terms of more than twenty-four hours; often it was less. They had learned the knack of intensive living. World-old truths were flashed into their minds like spot-lights; friends were made and lost in a few hours; eternity was visioned and compassed in a minute. The last words Jerry Donoghue of Ward 7-A had said before he went west came back to Sheila with a curious persistence.
“When all’s said and done, miss, it’s been a grand life—Brave lads for comrades—a lass who kept faith to the end—a good fight an’ somethin’ good to fight for—Near five years of it—wi’ perdition grinnin’ ye in the face an’ the Holy Mother walkin’ at your back—Sure, I might ha’ lived fifty year in Letterkenny an’ never tasted life half so plentiful—or—so—sweet.”
That was the strange part of it; they had all found life “plentiful an’ sweet”—nurses, surgeons, soldiers alike. They might be homesick, worn out with the business of fighting and patching up afterward, eternally aching in body and heart with the long stretches of horror and work with little sleep and less food, and yet not a handful out of every thousand of them would have chosen to quit if they could.
But when the quitting-time came, when war was over, what was going to happen then? Sheila wondered it about the boys who lay unconscious on their stretchers, packed in the room about her. She wondered it about the boys conscious in their cots below. Most of all she wondered it about Ward 7-A. It was going to hurt somany to have to look beyond the immediate day into a procession of numberless days stretching into years and years. The sudden relaxing from big efforts to little ones, that would hurt, too, like the uncramping of over-strained muscles. And the being thrown back on oneself to think, to act, to feel for oneself again—what of that? It was like dismembering a gigantic machine and scattering the infinitesimal parts of it broadcast over the earth to function alone. Only many of the parts would be imperfect, and all would have souls to reckon with.
But of the puzzle of it one fact stood out grippingly vital to Sheila. No soul must be thrown out of the melting-pot back into the old accustomed order of life and be left to feel unfit or unnecessary. There must be a big, compelling place for every man who came home. Of all the tragedies of war, she could conceive no greater one than to have these men who had put no limit to the price they were willing to pay to make the world safe for democracy sent back useless, to mark time to eternity.
But who was going to keep this from happening? How were the thousands of mutilésto be made free of the burden of dependence and toleration? Who was going to guard them against atrophy of spirit? The nurse gathered up the last of the instruments and threw them in the sterilizer. As she took off her apron and wiped the beads of sweat from her face, her chief eyed her suspiciously.
“Get your coffee before you touch those dressings in 7-A. Understand? When did you have your clothes off last?” He growled like a good-natured but spent old dog.
The girl gave her uniform a disgusted look. “Pretty bad, isn’t it? I put it on four—no, five days ago, but I’ve had my shoes off twice.” She laid an impulsive hand on the chief’s arm. “Promise about the coffee if you’ll promise to do the dressings with me instead of Captain Griggs. He calls them the ‘down-and-outers.’ I can’t quite stand for that.”
“Well, what would you call ’em?”
“The invincibles,” she declared. “Wouldn’t you?”
But for all her promise, Sheila O’Leary did not get past the door of 7-A without putting in her head and calling out a “good morning.” Whereupon twelve Irish tongues, drippingalmost as many brogues, flung it back at her with a vengeance.
There were thirteen of them, all told, the remnants of a company of Royal Irish that had crossed the Scheldt with Haig. As Larry Shea had put it on the day of their arrival, they “made as grand leavin’s as one could expect under the circumstances.” The ambulances that had brought them, along with the additional seven who had gone west, had pivoted wrong at one of the crossroads, so that the American Military Hospital No. 10 had fallen heir to them instead of the B. H. T. It is recorded that even the chief showed consternation when he looked them over, and Larry, catching the look and being the only man conscious at the time, snorted indignantly:
“Well, sir, if ye think we’re a mess, ye should have seen the Fritzies we left behind. Furninst them we’re an ordther of perfectly decent lads.” And Larry had crumpled up into a grinning unconsciousness.
It was Larry who led the singing; it was Larry now who, with an eye on the one silent figure in the ward and another on the nurse in the doorway, threw a wheedling remark tohold her with them a moment “by way of heartenment to Jamie.” “Wait a bit, miss. Patsy MacLean was just askin’ were ye a good hand at layin’ a ghost?”
Before Sheila could answer, Harrigan, an Irish-American orderly, stepped over the threshold and shook a fist at 7-A.
“Aw, cut it out. The way this bunch works Miss O’Leary makes me sick. Don’t cher know she hasn’t been off duty for twenty-four hours? Let her go, can’t cher?”
Johnnie O’Neil, from the far end of the room, smiled the smile of a cherub. “An’ don’t ye know, laddie, that it’s always the saints in heaven that has the worst sinners on their hands? ’Tis jealous ye are, not being wicked enough to get a bit more of her attention yerself.”
Sheila smiled impartially at them both, and with a parting promise of dressings to come she hurried off. Ward 7-A settled itself to wait for the worst and the best that the day had to offer. The room was a very small one, and the thirteen cots barely crowded into it, with space at the foot for Jamie O’Hara’s wheel-chair to go the length and turn. Theyhad been kept together by Sheila’s urgent plea that they should be given a ward to themselves instead of scattering them through the larger wards, and it is doubtful if in all the war a more quietly merciful act had been executed. Not one of the thirteen but would have scorned to show any sign of dependence on the others, yet intuitively the girl had guessed what they would be able to give one another in the matter of spiritual succor. The way they continually hectored and teased, matched wits and good humor, as they had matched strength and daring in the old fighting-days before the hospital, was meat and drink to the souls struggling for dominance over mutilated bodies. United, they were men; separated—Sheila had often shuddered to think what pitiful, pain-tortured beings they might have been.
When she returned to the ward the chief was with her, and their combined arrival brought forth a prolonged, fortissimoed wail shammed forth in good Gaelic fashion. Larry’s great hairy arm shot out, and a vindictive forefinger was wagged in the direction of the third cot.
“Ye’d best begin with Patsy MacLean thisday. He hasn’t been laid out first in a fortnight.”
The others, taking the words from Larry’s tongue, chorused, “Aye, begin wi’ Patsy, the devil take him!”
“Why the devil? Wouldn’t Fritzie do as well?” The chief smiled indulgently upon them all.
“’Tis a case for the devil, this time. Tell the colonel what you were putting over us last night,” Michael Kenney, lance-corporal, growled through an undercurrent of chuckle.
Patrick MacLean, the color-sergeant, grinned as he reached out a welcoming hand to both surgeon and nurse. He was a prime favorite with them, as with his own lads. When pain wrestled for the upper hand, when things went wrong, moods turned black, or nights stretched interminably long and unendurable, Patsy could always turn the trick and produce something so absorbingly interesting or ridiculous that the pain and the long nights were forgotten. How well Sheila remembered that first time they had dressed his wounds! The muscles had stood out on his arms like whipcords; sweat poureddown his face. He fainted twice, each time coming round to drawl out his story in that unforgetable Irish way:
“We were dthrivin’ them afore us like sheep, all so tame an’ sociable I was forgettin’ where I was. Somehow the notion took me I was back on the moorlan’ drivin’ the flocks for my father, when a Fritzie overhead drops a bomb on our captain.... It spatters the mud in my eyes somethin’ terrible, an’ when I rubs them clean again the machine-guns were cacklin’ all round us like a parcel o’ hens layin’ eggs; we’d stumbled on a nest of them. Holy Pether, I was mad! I was for stickin’ the colors in the muzzle o’ one o’ their bloody guns, an’ I sings out as I rush ’em, ‘Erin go bragh!’ Then down I goes. Culmullen, there, comes staggerin’ up. ‘Take the colors,’ says I. ‘I’ve got no legs to carry ’em on.’ ‘I can’t,’ says he; ‘I’ve got no arms to shoulder ’em.’... A bit aftherwards I sees Jamie—he’s second in command—come runnin’ up wild, but his arms an’ legs is still in pairs, so I shouts afore things go black, ‘The colors, Jamie, ye take the colors.’ ‘Wish to God, Patsy, I could,’ says he, ‘but I can’t see.’... Faith, weren’t we a healthylot, miss? An’ we the Royal Irish!” He had grinned then as he was grinning now.
Culmullen in the next cot, a schoolmaster from Ballygowan, raised his head. “Miss O’Leary, Patsy’s the worst liar in Ulster. Ye might keep that in mind whenever he has anything to tell. If I had had the schooling of ye, I’d have thrashed the thruth into ye, ye rascal! Will ye kindly lean over and brush the hair out of my eyes, and if ye tickle my nose this time, I’ll have Larry thrash ye for me the instant he’s up.”
The color-sergeant pulled himself over and gently brushed back the straggling hair. “Such a purty lad!” he murmured, sarcastically. “What’s an arm or two so long’s the Fritzies didn’t ruin one o’ them handsome features—nor shorten the length o’ your tongue.”
“What is it this time, Sergeant?” Sheila spoke coaxingly as she bent to the dressings.
“Well, ye know I’ve said from the beginnin’ ’twas no ways natural havin’ them legs o’ mine twistin’ an’ achin’ same as if they were still hangin’ onto me. I leave it to both of yez. If they’d been anyways decent legs an’ considerate o’ the kindness I’vealways shown them, wouldn’t they have quit pestherin’ me when they took Dutch leave?”
“Stop moralizin’,” shouted Johnnie O’Neil, the piper from Antrim. “Get down to the p’int o’ your tale.”
“It hasn’t any point: it’s flat,” growled the lance-corporal.
Unembarrassed, Patsy MacLean went on: “I was a-thinkin’ this all over again last night, a-listenin’ to the ambulances comin’ in, when a breath o’ wind pushes the door open a bit, an’ in walks, as natural as life, the ghost o’ them two legs. ’Tis the gospel truth I’m tellin’ ye. They walked a bit bowlegged, same as they always did, straight through the door an’ down the ward. An’ the queer thing is they never stopped by Larry’s cot or Casey Ryan’s—the heathen!—but came right on to me.”
“Faith, they wouldn’t have had the nerve to stop. The leg Casey lost was as straight as a hazel wand, same as mine.” Larry snorted contemptuously.
“The two of yez are jealous.” Patsy lowered his voice to a mock whisper and confided to the chief and Sheila, “They know they’ll have to be buyin’ a good pair o’ shoesan’ throwin’ the odd away, while I’ll be sayin’ enough from the shoes I’ll never have to be buyin’ to keep mysel’ in cigars for the rest o’ my life.”
“But Patsy’s wondtherin’ can ye lay the ghost, miss?” Timothy Brennan, who had lost the “cream of his face,” repeated the question Larry had asked a half-hour before. The rest of the ward tittered expectantly.
“Let me see—” The Irish blood in her steadied the nurse’s hands, while she drew her lips into quizzical solemnity and winked at Culmullen over her shoulder. “I always thought it was restlessness that sent ghosts walking. Maybe these have come back, looking for their boots.”
The titter broke into a roar of delight. “Thrue for ye!” shouted Parley-voo Flynn, pounding the arm of Jamie’s chair with his one fist. “All ye’ve got to do, Patsy, is to be puttin’ your boots beside your chair onct more, an’ them legs will scrooch comfortably into them an’ never haunt ye again. The lass is right, isn’t she, Jamie?”
Eleven pairs of eyes and an odd one shifted apprehensively from the lad who was being dressed to the lad in the wheel-chair, and theeyes all showed varying degrees of trouble, uncertainty, and sorrow. They had a way of searching Jamie out in this fashion many times a day, while he sat very still, with eyes bandaged and lips that never flinched but never broke to a smile.
Larry shook a hairy fist at Parley-voo and answered the question himself:
“Of course she’s right! Isn’t she always? An’ who but a heathen would be doubtin’ the manners of a ghost?”
“Aye, but where will I be gettin’ the boots?” Patsy made a sour grimace. “Me own purty ones had Christian burial somewhere back in that tremendous mud-puddle. Would any gentleman, now, still havin’ two good legs, give me the loan of his boots for one night? Size eleven, if I don’t disremember.”
“That’s Teig’s number. Lend him yours, Teig, like a good lad, or we’ll never be rid o’ them ghosts.” Mat O’Shaughnessy, at the other end of the line, fairly shook with the depth of his wail.
Teig Magee chuckled. He had lost an inch or so of back and was waiting the glad day when they could mend it with an inch orso of shin-bone; in the mean time he was paralyzed. “Say, Docthor, would ye mind reachin’ undther my pillow an’ fetchin’ them out for me? The lads have a way of forgettin’ my hands are temporarily engaged. Thank ye. Ye can have them, Patsy, but ye’ll have to go bail your ghosts won’t up an’ thramp off wi’ them entirely.”
It ended by the schoolmaster giving security—a half-crown with a bullet hole through it. Sheila was appointed custodian, and the boots were placed beside the color-sergeant’s cot “against the comin’ night.”
As the chief and Sheila passed on from cot to cot, the spirits of Ward 7-A never wavered. Johnnie, who had piped the lads into battle and out for four years, and who daily rejoiced over the fact that Fritzie had shown the good sense to take a foot instead of a hand, told them that he was in rare luck now, for there would be time to make wee Johnnie at home the grandest piper in all of Ireland—an honor he could never have promised himself before.
There was “Bertha” Milliken, named for the big gun he had put out of commission and the gun crew he had captured. He had been giventhe V. C. for that. His pet joke was telling how the Fritzies grudged him its possession by shooting it away on the Scheldt along with a good bit that was under it. The nurse and surgeon handled “Bertha” very carefully; there was no knowing just what was going to happen to him. Casey Ryan had lost the odd of ’most everything the Lord had started him with, as he put it. An eye, an ear, a lung, and a leg were gone, and he was beating all the others at getting well. Mat O’Shaughnessy had it in the “vital.” He was continuously boasting that it was the handiest place of all, and if it didn’t get him he’d be the only perfect specimen invalided home.
“Parley-voo,” the only one of them who essayed French, had wounds many but inconspicuous. He was given to counting a hypothetical fortune that might be his if the Empire would give him a shilling for every time he had been hit. Joseph Daly and “Gospel” Smith, the one Methodist, carried head wounds, while “Granny” Sullivan, the oldest, wisest, and most comforting of the company, had one smashed hip and a hole through the other, “the devil of a combination.” Never had the atmosphere of 7-Abeen keener or spicier. Jamie alone sat still and silent.
Jamie was the last to be dressed, and because there was little to do the chief slipped away and left him to Sheila. As the nurse passed from Mat’s cot to the wheel-chair, eleven pairs of eyes and an odd one followed her. A hush fell suddenly on the ward. The lads never intended this should happen, but somehow, at the same time everyday, the silence gripped them, and they seemed powerless to stay it. It was “Granny” Sullivan who first threw it off.
“’Tis a grand day outside, Jamie. Maybe ye’re feeling the sun, now, comin’ through the window?”
The nurse had lifted the bandage from the eyes. There was nothing there but empty sockets, almost healed. One could hear the quick intake of breath from the watching twelve, while every face registered an agony it had scorned to show for its own disablement. But for Jamie, “the singing lad from Derry” as they lovingly called him, it was different. They could face their own conditions with amazing jocularity, but they writhed daily under the torment of Jamie’s.They could brave it no better than could he. For to put eternal darkness on the lad who loved the light, who would sit spellbound before the play of colors in the east at dawn or the flash of moonlight across troubled water, who could make a song out of the smile of a child or the rhythm of flying birds in the sky, that was damnable. An arch-fiend might have conceived it, but where was God to let it happen? A crippled Jamie without an arm or a leg was endurable—that cried out for no blasphemy—but a Jamie without eyes—God in heaven, how could it be!
The face of the singing lad was the face of a dreamer, as exquisite as a piece of marble that might have been fashioned by Praxiteles for a sun god. Since the battle on the Scheldt it had become a white mask, shorn of all dreams. Almost it might have been a death-mask for the soul of Jamie O’Hara. It showed no response now when “Granny” spoke; only the lad’s hands fluttered a moment toward the window, then dropped heavily back into his lap.
“Aye, maybe I feel it.” The voice was colorless and tired. “I can’t be remembering clear sunlight any more. The last days ofthe fighting, smoke was too thick in the sky, or the rains fell.”
Eleven pairs of eyes and one odd one cast about for some inspiration. “Sure, think o’ somethin’ pleasanter nor cannon smoke an’ rain. Think o’—” “Granny” floundered for a moment, then gave up in despair.
“That’s all I see when I look up. When I look down, it’s worse—an everlasting earth, covered with mud and dying men!” Jamie shivered.
Larry struggled out of his torment. “I say, Jamie, don’t ye mind the song ye were makin’ for us the day we fell back from Cambrai? ’Twas an Irish one, full o’ the sun an’ the singin’ birds of Donegal. Wi’ the Fritzies risin’ like a murdtherous tide behind us, ’twas all that kept the heart in us that day. Ye say it for Miss O’Leary. Sure, ye’ve never said a song for her yet.”
Jamie shook his head. “I’m sorry, lad; I’ve lost it. I was making so many songs those days—ye couldn’t be expecting a body to carry them all about in his head. Now could ye?” The lips tried bravely to smile, and failed again.
But Larry grinned triumphantly. “Sure‘Granny’ has it wrote down. He showed it to me once. Fetch it, ‘Granny,’ an’ let Jamie be re—” He broke off, aghast; the lads about him were staring in absolute horror. Only the singing lad showed nothing. He might not have heard, or, hearing, the words were meaningless.
So Sheila took matters into her own hands. She covered the eyes with fresh gauze, wrapped Jamie up, and bundled him out in his chair to Harrigan with the remark that the day was too fine to miss and there was more of it outside the hospital than in. She watched until she had seen Harrigan take him to a sunny, wind-sheltered corner of the gardens, and then she came back to 7-A. She was thinking of Peter Brooks, her man at the front, and she was trying to fathom with all her heart what manner of healing she would give had Peter come back to her as Jamie O’Hara had come. She closed the door of the ward behind her and faced the twelve.
“Lads, what are we going to do for Jamie?”
Larry groaned out loud. It was the first luxury of expression he had indulged in since Jamie had been wheeled out. “Aye, whatare we goin’ to do? That’s what every man of us has been askin’ himself since—since he knew.”
“We act like a crowd o’ half-wits, a-thryin’ to boost his spirits a bit, an’ all the time he grows whiter an’ quieter.” Patsy turned his head away; his lips were twitching.
“Aye, that’s God’s truth.” “Bertha’s” hoarse croak was heavy with despair. “Ye can see for yourself, miss, it’s noways nat’ral for Jamie—that’s the worst of it. It’s been Jamie, just, that always put heart back in us when things went blackest. Wasn’t it him that made it easy goin’ for them that went west? Can one of us mind the time he wasn’t ready with a song to fetch us over the top, or through the mud—or straight to death, if them was the orders? No matter how loud the guns screeched, we could always hear Jamie above them.”
“We could hear him when we couldn’t have heard another sound,” Culmullen mumbled.
“Gospel” Smith raised a bandaged head and leveled piercing eyes at Sheila. “You know what the Gospel says about the stars singing in the morning—all together like? Well, Jamie was the lad who could outsing them.You know how it feels at that gray, creepy hour o’ dawn, when a man’s heart jumps to his throat and sticks there, and his hands shake like a girl’s? Often’s the time we’d be waiting orders to attack just like that. The stars might have shouted themselves clear o’ the sky, for all the good they’d have done us; but Jamie was different. He’d make us a couplet or a verse to sing low under our breath, something you could put your teeth into. And when the orders came our hearts were always back where the Lord had put them.”
“Granny” Sullivan plucked nervously at his blanket. “An’ now, when we want to hearten him, we’re hurtin’ instead. Seems as if the devil took hold of our tongues an’ spilled the wrong words off.”
“Shall I tell you what I would try to do, if I were one of you Irish lads who had fought with him?” Sheila’s face was as drawn as any of the twelve.
“In God’s name tell us!” Johnnie, the piper, spoke as reverently as if he were at mass.
“You heard what he said just now about seeing nothing but mud and dying men?Well, that’s the trouble. He can’t see any longer things he loves, the things he has always carried in his heart. All the beautiful memories have been lost, and all he has left are the horrors of those last days. He’s got nothing left to make into songs any more. Don’t you see? You’ve got to bring that back to him, that power to see—here.” The girl’s hand pressed her heart.
“Aye, but how?” Patsy asked it breathlessly.
“Bring him back his memories—memories of Ireland, of the things he loved best to sing about. You have eyes; make him see.”
A hush fell on Ward 7-A. Then Timothy Brennan muttered as a man alone: “’Tis the words of a woman. God’s blessin’ on her!”
All through the day there rang through Sheila’s ears the last words Jamie had said to her that morning. He had turned his face back, as Harrigan had wheeled him away, to answer her “All right, Jamie?” with “As right as ever I’ll be. Do ye know, the O’Haras are famous for their long living? My grandfather lived to be ninety-eight, and his father to be over a hundred. That leaves me seventy-five years, maybe. Seventy-fiveyears! And already I’m fearin’ the length of a day.” She was still hearing them when she came back to the ward at day’s end to find Jamie in his old accustomed place by the window. His face was as masklike as ever, and Larry was talking:
“Sure, I mind often an’ often how the neighbors used to tell me if I’d lie asleep with my ear to a fairy rath I’d be hearin’ their music an’ seein’ their dancin’. But I never did. But I saw a sight as grand, the flight o’ the skylark at ring-o’-day. Many’s the time I’ve seen them leave the marsh an’ go liltin’ into the blue.”
“And the lilting!” Culmullen closed his eyes the better to recall it. “I mind the last time I heard one. The sky was turned orange, and the lough turned gold. The marsh was glistening with mist, and out of the reeds where her nest was she flew. It was like a feathered bundle of song thrown skyward.”
“Aye, what a song!” Johnnie, the piper, spoke with ecstasy. “Hark! I can make it.” He puckered his lips, and through them came the sweet, lilting notes of the lark’s matin song.
“Make it again.” Jamie was leaning forward in his chair, his hands gripping the arms.
Again the piper whistled it through, and then again and again. A smile brushed Jamie’s lips, and the others, watching, breathless, saw.
“What is it?” asked “Granny,” softly.
“Naught. Only for the moment I was thinking I could be smelling the dew on the bogs, yonder. Can ye pipe for the blackbirds, Johnnie?”
And Johnnie piped.
So a new order of things was established in Ward 7-A, and as heretofore the lads had vied in witty derision of their calamities they vied now with one another in telling tales of Ireland. Each marshaled forth his dearest, greenest memory, clothed in its best, to fill the ears and heart of Jamie O’Hara. Sometimes he smiled, and then there was a great, silent rejoicing among the twelve; sometimes he asked for more, and then tongues tripped over one another in mad effort to furnish forth a memory more wonderful than all that had gone before. But more often he sat still and white, as if he heard nothing. And in the midst of it all, as the lads drew each daynearer to health, Sheila noted a new uneasiness among them. It was Larry who spoke the trouble while the nurse was doing his dressings. He whispered it, so the others should not hear.
“By rights we don’t belong here. Well, they’ll be movin’ us soon as we’re mended, won’t they?”
The nurse nodded.
“Invalided home. Ye know what that means?”
Again the nurse nodded.
“Mind ye, there’s been never a word dropped atween us, but we’re all fearin’ it like—” Larry rubbed his sleeve over his mouth twice before he went on. “While we’ve got Jamie to think about, we can manage, but when he’s packed off somewheres—to learn readin’ an’ writin’ for the blind—an’ we’re scattered to the four winds o’ Ireland, we’ll be realizin’ for the first time what we are, just. Then what are we goin’ to do? I ask ye it honest, miss.”
And honestly Sheila answered, “I don’t know.”
A day later “Granny” whispered over his dressings: “Faith there’s a shadow creepingover the sill. Can’t ye be feeling it?” And the color-sergeant’s spirits failed to rise that day at all.
Yet for all their fears the inevitable day came upon them unawares and caught them, as you might say, red-handed. Sheila had stolen a half-hour from rest and was sitting with them, listening to Casey Ryan, the Galway lad, tell of the fishing in Kilkieran Bay.
Larry took the words out of his mouth. “’Twill be the proud day for us all when we cast our eyes on Irish wather again, whether ’tis in Dublin Bay or off the Skerries.”
“Aye, and smelling the thorn bloom and hearing the throstles sing!” “Granny’s” rejoicing followed on the heels of Larry’s, while he shook his fist at him in warning.
Larry threw a helpless look at Jamie and sank back on his pillow, while Patsy roared his ultimatum: “I’d a deal sight rather hear a throstle sing than see all the bloody wather in the world. Larry’s fair mad about wather ever since he went dirty for a fortnight at Vimy.”
“Sure, the thing I’m most wantin’,” croaked “Bertha,” “is to hear the wind in the heather again, deep o’ the night. Thereisn’t a sweeter sound than that, so soft an’ croony-like.”
“Yes, an’ I’ll be wantin’ to hear the old cracked voice o’ Biddy Donoghue callin’ cockles at the Antrim fair. Faith, she’s worth thravelin’ far to be hearin’. An’ think o’ gettin’ your tooth on a live cockle!” Johnnie moistened his lips in anticipation as he broke forth in a falsetto:
“Cockles—good cockles—here’s some for your dad,An’ some for your lassie—an’ more for your lad.”
Amid the appreciative chuckle of the listeners, the door of Ward 7-A opened and the chief stood on the threshold. He smiled as a man may when he has a hurting thing to do and grudges the doing of it. He saluted the remnants of Company—of the Royal Irish:
“Orders, lads. You’ll be leaving to-morrow for—Blighty.”
There was nothing but silence, a silence of agony and apprehension, until Patsy whispered, “Leavin’together, sir?”
“I—hope so.”
“Thravelin’—the same?” It was Timothy Brennan this time.
“I don’t know.”
“Will we be afther makin’ the same hospital yondther—do ye think?” It took all Larry’s fighting soul to keep his voice steady.
“I—It isn’t likely.”
“Thank ye, sir.”
That was all. The chief left, and Sheila sat on in the stillness of Ward 7-A, wondering wherein lay the value of theories when in the face of the first crucial need one sat stunned and helpless. The mask of good spirits had dropped from the lads like a camouflaged screen; behind it showed the naked, bleeding souls of twelve terror-stricken men. For Jamie’s mask was still upon him. If the orders had brought any added misery to him, no one could have told.
As Sheila looked into their faces and saw all that was written there, she gripped her hands behind her and tried to tell them what she had thought out so clearly in the operating-room days and days before. But the message she had thought was hers to give had somehow become meaningless. What guarantee had she to make that their lives would go on being vital, necessary to the big scheme of humanity? How could she promise thatout of their share in the war and the price they had paid would be wrought something so fine, so strong and eternal, that the years ahead must needs hold plenty for their hearts and souls? She could not get beyond the realization that it was all only theory, the theory of one glowingly healthy mind in a sound body. If such a promise could be given at all, it must not come from such as she; if it was to bear faith, it must be spoken by one who had gone through the crucible as they had gone through—and come out even as they had come.
She looked at Jamie. If Jamie had only had eyes to catch the meaning of the thing she was trying to say! If he who had sung courage into their hearts in the old days could sing it once again! A message from Jamie would bring it home.
But there was nothing in that blank, white face Sheila could reach. He seemed as he had seemed from the beginning, a soul apart, so wrapped in its own despair that no human cry of need could shake it free. In desperation she looked at Larry. His eyes were closed; his face had gone almost as white as Jamie’s. Patsy was gazing at the ceiling;the veins on his arms stood out as they had on that first day when he had fainted twice from the pain of his dressing. Down the line of cots the nurse’s eyes traveled, and back again. Every lad was past speaking for another; each lay transfixed with his own personal fear.
The minutes seemed intolerable. The silence grew heavy with so much muffling of despair. Sheila found herself praying that the men would groan, cry out, curse, anything to break the ghastly hush. Then suddenly “Bertha” propped himself as best he could on an elbow and croaked: “For the love of Mary, miss, can’t ye cram us with morphine the night? ’Twould save the British Empire a few shillin’s’ expense and them at home a deal o’ misery.”
And the color-sergeant choked out, “Aye, in God’s mercy send us west, along wi’ them lucky seven that has gone already!”
Without knowing why she did it, Sheila reached over and gripped one of Jamie’s hands. “Help, can’t you?” she whispered. The late afternoon sun was shining through the window back of him. The glory of it was full on his face, so that every lad in theward saw plainly the smile that crept into the lips, a tender, whimsical smile that belonged to the Jamie of old. And the deep, vibrating voice was the voice of the Jamie of fighting days.
“Patsy, ye rascal! I’m thinking it was like yourself to come breaking into the first song I’ve had on my lips in a month. You’ve nearly ruined it for me, lad.”
Amazement, incredulity, thanksgiving swept over the faces like puffs of wind over young wheat. Unnoticed, Sheila turned to the window and wept a scattering of tears that could no longer be held back. Jamie pulled himself out of the wheel-chair and found his way down the space at the foot of the cots to the door. He was very straight, and his head was high.
“Just a minute, lads.” He dug his hands deep into his pockets. “Before I give ye the song I’ve made for ye, there’s something I have to be saying first. Miss O’Leary was right when she said a man has more than one pair of eyes to see with. He can see grand with his heart—if he’s shown the way. That’s what I have to thank ye for this day, the wiping of my memory clean of those lastdays, and the showing me how to see anew. Ye’ve given Ireland back to me with her lark songs, her blue, dancing water, her wind-brushed heather like a purple sea. Ye’ve made the world beautiful for me again, and ye’ve given me the heart to sing.”
He stopped a minute and smiled again. “I was thinking all this when the chief came in, and after that I was so busy with the song that sprang into my mind that I came near forgetting the lot o’ ye. If that rascal Patsy hadn’t interrupted me, faith, I might have made the song longer.”
Sheila turned back from the window. There was a grin on the face of every lad, and on the face of Jamie was the look of a man who had found his dreams again. The song being new to his tongue, he gave it slowly:
“They say the earth’s a bit shot up—well, we can say the same,But, praise to every lad that’s fought, the scars they show no shame.And for those who have prayed for us—why, here’s an end to tears.Sure, God can do much healing in the next handful of years.“So, Johnnie, set your chanter and blow your pipes full strong,And, Larry, raise your voice again and lead our marching song.Let Mac unfurl the colors—till they sweep yon crimson west,For we’re still the Royal Irish, a-fighting with the best.”
And that is precisely the way they went when they left the American Military Hospital No. 10 the next morning. The color-sergeant led. Jamie walked beside the stretcher to give a hand with the staff. Johnnie sat bolt upright, bolstered with many pillows, to enable him to get a firm grip on the pipes, and he skirled the “Shule Aroon” as he had never skirled before. Larry’s voice again boomed in the lead, and every man in the hospital that had breath to spare cheered them as they passed. And for every one who saw or heard the going of the Royal Irish, that day, was left behind a memory green enough to last till the end of time.