CHAPTER XVITHE PROMISETheyfound a haven of refuge for her in the house of the curé of Morsbronn, and she slept there until the sun was shining upon Wörth again. It was odd to wake in that little white bedroom, and to find herself wrapped about with the cloak of a Hessian dragoon, and to hear the voices of men busy in the rooms below, and those other sounds of squadrons marching and of guns rolling by to Strasburg and the West. She could not, for a little while, recall the means by which she had come to the house; neither was there any clear memory of yesterday, nor of its events. When she looked from the window, out upon the high road, she could see a red cross flying from the pillar of the garden gates, and everywhere, on the heights above and in the valley below, the spiked helmets glistened in the sunshine. These indomitable Prussians were the masters of Wörth, then! The glorious army of yesterday—that army which was to defend the homes of France—it was an army no more. A sense of her utter helplessness took possession of her anew. Sheremembered, one by one, the circumstances she had forgotten. They had burned her house. Edmond was a prisoner. Brandon North had brought her to the priest’s cottage, and would come again at dawn to put her on the road to Strasburg. She must return to her friends, he had said. Wörth was no longer a fit place for her.He came at eight o’clock, and waited for her in the garden of the cottage. She could hardly believe, even yet, that this great fellow, in the dark green uniform, was the same Brandon who had been her English friend in Strasburg. A new dignity was the soldier’s gift to him. The invincible might of Germany, the victory of the Saxon, were so many sops to his own ambition. He spoke to her almost as a brother, and, for the first time, she had a certain awe of him.“I’m sorry to be troublesome,” he said, when he saw her at the window of the room; “we march in half an hour, and if you can be ready, an Englishman here, who is driving to Hagenau, will take you in his cart. Do you think you can manage it?”“You still believe that I ought to go?”“Well—it’s for you to say. If you want to stop at Wörth an hour longer than you can help, I shall be surprised. That’s all.”She nodded her head, and began to make a hurried toilet. Upon going downstairs, she found the priest standing before the door of his sitting-room, and barring it to her. A forgotten candle guttered in a stick upon a table; and there were bloody bandages and a tumbler of water beside it. Low moaning sounds came from the apartment, and even there, in the hall, a dark crimson stain gave sanctity to the boards. She knew then that some of the wounded men were in the house; and even while she stood they carried in a dying cuirassier, and she could look for an instant into that charnel-house, where the living sat with the dead, and the aftermath of war was being reaped.“This way, Madame, this way,” the old man cried imploringly; “those poor fellows—we can help them only with our prayers. They have been coming here all night. Ah, that we should see such sights; that God should permit men to do these things!”He took her by the hand and led her through the kitchen of the house. There were German officers there, a merry party, hardened to the scenes about, and careless in its talk of victory and of advance. The men bowed to her as she passed, for they understood that she was the English friend of the “Herr Major.” In the garden she found Brandon waiting by his horse. The thoughtcame to her that it was good to have such a friend in such a place. There was no question of the “might be” where the Prussians stood.“Oh,” she said, shuddering still with horror of the house, “how good it is to breathe again! Have you been waiting long, Brandon?”“I was up here at six, but they told me you were asleep. You must be tired enough after yesterday, and you’ll have a long day. I didn’t want to wake you, but it was necessary if you are to come with us. Of course you will come. There’s not a house in Wörth fit for a dog just now. We can make a road if you’ll go in Watts’s cart. He’s an eccentric old fellow, attached to one of the New York papers—though he’s an Englishman for all that. I told him that you were an Englishwoman and had friends in Strasburg, and he’s only too pleased to help. I dare say he’ll drive you right into the town. Don’t mind his bluntness. He’s a regular old Bohemian, and not a sham one made in an alehouse. It will be best for you to stay there with Madame Hélène, or to go down into Switzerland, as you please; but, if you take my advice, Beatrix, you won’t stop a day longer in the Place Kleber than you can help. You see for yourself what’s going to happen. And Strasburg won’t be a pleasant place when von Werder calls there.”He spoke to her with a certain intimacy of friendship, as though they two stood apart from this quarrel of nations, and had a common interest elsewhere, in their nationality and their circumstances. She heard him in that spirit; but her own future was no concern to her. At Strasburg, among her friends—at Madame Hélène’s house—all would be well there.“Of course I shall go,” she said; “it’s very good of you to trouble so much, and Edmond will be grateful. He would not look for me anywhere else when he comes back. If I could only be sure that they are treating him well.”She laughed at herself for the naïve confession, and corrected it instantly.“You are a Prussian,” she said. “I forgot that. And you never told us—”He shrugged his shoulders.“My father made his home in Germany. I offered myself for the service. A man cannot always look at life through empty wine-bottles. Buying and selling are not altogether intellectual pursuits, you will admit. If I had thought that there was any backbone on the other side, I might have gone there on a sporting impulse. All that appealed to me—order, method, strength, iron will—is the property of the Saxon. We may not like it, but we must not dispute it. And I ought not to say such things to you, who are waiting for breakfast. Have you ever breakfasted in camp before, Beatrix?”He began to lead his horse away from the priest’s cottage to the bivouac of dragoons, and put the question as he went. This half-hour of a subtle and satisfying intimacy might never return. He rejoiced in the comradeship, but from other motives than those which gave her pleasure in it. And she would remember only that she had found a friend.“No,” she said, looking up to him frankly. “I am a soldier’s wife, and I know nothing about soldiers. If your order and your method and your iron will could help some of these poor people who die in the fields, I would think more of the Saxon. You can never make good the evil of yesterday, never, never, Brandon. What is it in us all that makes us callous to suffering as we are now? When a trooper was killed at Niederbronn a week ago, it was as though one of my own servants had died in our garden. I thought of the poor fellow all night, and prayed for him. Yesterday the dead were everywhere, and we passed them by as though they had been stones. Is it ‘backbone’ that gives us the courage to look at things always through the glasses of self? Why, at this very minute, ought not I to be asking myself how I can help Edmond, and not how I can get to Strasburg?”He laughed at the unconscious conceit of her thought.“You can help your husband best by keeping out of harm’s way,” he said. “We are not savages, Beatrix, nor cannibals either, for that matter. Edmond is all the better where he is. He won’t be killed, anyway, and everyone is talking of his fellows and their charge yesterday. Whatever may happen to the rank and file, the officers will be well treated, be sure of that. I wouldn’t mind being in their place at all. They’ll have good quarters, and plenty to eat and drink. When the war’s over—and that’s a matter of a few weeks at the most—they’ll come back whole men, and not as those poor fellows yonder. Is there anything to make you sorry in that prospect?”They had entered the field of the bivouac then, and he pointed to a row of wounded infantrymen, sitting beneath a tottering wall, which was the last upstanding mark where, yesterday, a prosperous farm had been. All the men were badly hurt, yet all bore their sufferings with unflinching patience. War had obliterated a memory of their nationality. A great Würtemberger nursed the head of a maimed chasseur, and a gunner of France did his best to bind up the shattered hand of one of von Werder’s men. Faint and wan and unattended,these poor fellows made a brave attempt to salute when the officer approached them; nor did one of them utter so much as a single word of complaint.“Come,” said Brandon, desiring to put a bright face upon it, “and who is looking after your breakfasts, my poor fellows?”“Ah, Herr Major, if it were so much as a drink of water! I have been here since one o’clock yesterday—since one o’clock! My God, it is nearly twenty hours, and my lips are glued together.”Another opened his vest and showed a jagged wound upon which the blood had congealed.“They are slow up yonder, but then they are not in pain, Herr Major. As for me, I do not count. I shall never stand again.”“Do not talk so,” cried an old sergeant, whose arm had been scarred and broken by a shell from Froeschweiler; “we have our duty to do, and all this is nothing. The doctor will laugh at us for troubling him. A cigar would cure me, Herr Major—ah, you are all too kind to a useless old man.”Brandon distributed his cigars among them, and called to a trooper to fetch them water from the village and to send the ambulance. The place wherein they lay was a very pit of blood andagony; he turned from it quickly when he saw the white face of the girl at his side. He knew that she had all the desire and pity to serve them, and he understood the helplessness she realised and blamed.“It is a doctor’s work, Beatrix—you would only make things worse. The ambulance will be here just now, and they have already been looked after in some sort of way, as you see. You need a lot of training to stand this sort of thing, and remember you have had none at all—”He stopped abruptly, for there were tears in her eyes.“Brandon,” she said quickly, “do you not despise me—”“Because you are not a doctor? Certainly not—”“No, not for that, but for all that I have been talking about. As if anything mattered when those poor fellows suffer! And I am doing nothing, nothing. I have never done anything all my life—”“You can begin now by going back to Madame Hélène. She is alone in Strasburg. She will have need of you in the days to come. I am afraid they will be terrible days, Beatrix.”“Why should they be, Brandon?”“Because we march to-day.”Something of the strange circumstance of their association came in that moment to both of them. For the first time she read a suspicion of the whole truth in the look he turned upon her, but she would not think of it nor debate it in her mind lest that should be in itself a dishonour. After all, he was her husband’s friend. She would trust her life to him, and Edmond would applaud her confidence.“I will go to Strasburg now,” she said quickly. “If only I can hear of Edmond there!”“If that is all,” he said, “I will bring you the news myself.”She laughed.“They would shoot you for a spy,” she said.
CHAPTER XVITHE PROMISETheyfound a haven of refuge for her in the house of the curé of Morsbronn, and she slept there until the sun was shining upon Wörth again. It was odd to wake in that little white bedroom, and to find herself wrapped about with the cloak of a Hessian dragoon, and to hear the voices of men busy in the rooms below, and those other sounds of squadrons marching and of guns rolling by to Strasburg and the West. She could not, for a little while, recall the means by which she had come to the house; neither was there any clear memory of yesterday, nor of its events. When she looked from the window, out upon the high road, she could see a red cross flying from the pillar of the garden gates, and everywhere, on the heights above and in the valley below, the spiked helmets glistened in the sunshine. These indomitable Prussians were the masters of Wörth, then! The glorious army of yesterday—that army which was to defend the homes of France—it was an army no more. A sense of her utter helplessness took possession of her anew. Sheremembered, one by one, the circumstances she had forgotten. They had burned her house. Edmond was a prisoner. Brandon North had brought her to the priest’s cottage, and would come again at dawn to put her on the road to Strasburg. She must return to her friends, he had said. Wörth was no longer a fit place for her.He came at eight o’clock, and waited for her in the garden of the cottage. She could hardly believe, even yet, that this great fellow, in the dark green uniform, was the same Brandon who had been her English friend in Strasburg. A new dignity was the soldier’s gift to him. The invincible might of Germany, the victory of the Saxon, were so many sops to his own ambition. He spoke to her almost as a brother, and, for the first time, she had a certain awe of him.“I’m sorry to be troublesome,” he said, when he saw her at the window of the room; “we march in half an hour, and if you can be ready, an Englishman here, who is driving to Hagenau, will take you in his cart. Do you think you can manage it?”“You still believe that I ought to go?”“Well—it’s for you to say. If you want to stop at Wörth an hour longer than you can help, I shall be surprised. That’s all.”She nodded her head, and began to make a hurried toilet. Upon going downstairs, she found the priest standing before the door of his sitting-room, and barring it to her. A forgotten candle guttered in a stick upon a table; and there were bloody bandages and a tumbler of water beside it. Low moaning sounds came from the apartment, and even there, in the hall, a dark crimson stain gave sanctity to the boards. She knew then that some of the wounded men were in the house; and even while she stood they carried in a dying cuirassier, and she could look for an instant into that charnel-house, where the living sat with the dead, and the aftermath of war was being reaped.“This way, Madame, this way,” the old man cried imploringly; “those poor fellows—we can help them only with our prayers. They have been coming here all night. Ah, that we should see such sights; that God should permit men to do these things!”He took her by the hand and led her through the kitchen of the house. There were German officers there, a merry party, hardened to the scenes about, and careless in its talk of victory and of advance. The men bowed to her as she passed, for they understood that she was the English friend of the “Herr Major.” In the garden she found Brandon waiting by his horse. The thoughtcame to her that it was good to have such a friend in such a place. There was no question of the “might be” where the Prussians stood.“Oh,” she said, shuddering still with horror of the house, “how good it is to breathe again! Have you been waiting long, Brandon?”“I was up here at six, but they told me you were asleep. You must be tired enough after yesterday, and you’ll have a long day. I didn’t want to wake you, but it was necessary if you are to come with us. Of course you will come. There’s not a house in Wörth fit for a dog just now. We can make a road if you’ll go in Watts’s cart. He’s an eccentric old fellow, attached to one of the New York papers—though he’s an Englishman for all that. I told him that you were an Englishwoman and had friends in Strasburg, and he’s only too pleased to help. I dare say he’ll drive you right into the town. Don’t mind his bluntness. He’s a regular old Bohemian, and not a sham one made in an alehouse. It will be best for you to stay there with Madame Hélène, or to go down into Switzerland, as you please; but, if you take my advice, Beatrix, you won’t stop a day longer in the Place Kleber than you can help. You see for yourself what’s going to happen. And Strasburg won’t be a pleasant place when von Werder calls there.”He spoke to her with a certain intimacy of friendship, as though they two stood apart from this quarrel of nations, and had a common interest elsewhere, in their nationality and their circumstances. She heard him in that spirit; but her own future was no concern to her. At Strasburg, among her friends—at Madame Hélène’s house—all would be well there.“Of course I shall go,” she said; “it’s very good of you to trouble so much, and Edmond will be grateful. He would not look for me anywhere else when he comes back. If I could only be sure that they are treating him well.”She laughed at herself for the naïve confession, and corrected it instantly.“You are a Prussian,” she said. “I forgot that. And you never told us—”He shrugged his shoulders.“My father made his home in Germany. I offered myself for the service. A man cannot always look at life through empty wine-bottles. Buying and selling are not altogether intellectual pursuits, you will admit. If I had thought that there was any backbone on the other side, I might have gone there on a sporting impulse. All that appealed to me—order, method, strength, iron will—is the property of the Saxon. We may not like it, but we must not dispute it. And I ought not to say such things to you, who are waiting for breakfast. Have you ever breakfasted in camp before, Beatrix?”He began to lead his horse away from the priest’s cottage to the bivouac of dragoons, and put the question as he went. This half-hour of a subtle and satisfying intimacy might never return. He rejoiced in the comradeship, but from other motives than those which gave her pleasure in it. And she would remember only that she had found a friend.“No,” she said, looking up to him frankly. “I am a soldier’s wife, and I know nothing about soldiers. If your order and your method and your iron will could help some of these poor people who die in the fields, I would think more of the Saxon. You can never make good the evil of yesterday, never, never, Brandon. What is it in us all that makes us callous to suffering as we are now? When a trooper was killed at Niederbronn a week ago, it was as though one of my own servants had died in our garden. I thought of the poor fellow all night, and prayed for him. Yesterday the dead were everywhere, and we passed them by as though they had been stones. Is it ‘backbone’ that gives us the courage to look at things always through the glasses of self? Why, at this very minute, ought not I to be asking myself how I can help Edmond, and not how I can get to Strasburg?”He laughed at the unconscious conceit of her thought.“You can help your husband best by keeping out of harm’s way,” he said. “We are not savages, Beatrix, nor cannibals either, for that matter. Edmond is all the better where he is. He won’t be killed, anyway, and everyone is talking of his fellows and their charge yesterday. Whatever may happen to the rank and file, the officers will be well treated, be sure of that. I wouldn’t mind being in their place at all. They’ll have good quarters, and plenty to eat and drink. When the war’s over—and that’s a matter of a few weeks at the most—they’ll come back whole men, and not as those poor fellows yonder. Is there anything to make you sorry in that prospect?”They had entered the field of the bivouac then, and he pointed to a row of wounded infantrymen, sitting beneath a tottering wall, which was the last upstanding mark where, yesterday, a prosperous farm had been. All the men were badly hurt, yet all bore their sufferings with unflinching patience. War had obliterated a memory of their nationality. A great Würtemberger nursed the head of a maimed chasseur, and a gunner of France did his best to bind up the shattered hand of one of von Werder’s men. Faint and wan and unattended,these poor fellows made a brave attempt to salute when the officer approached them; nor did one of them utter so much as a single word of complaint.“Come,” said Brandon, desiring to put a bright face upon it, “and who is looking after your breakfasts, my poor fellows?”“Ah, Herr Major, if it were so much as a drink of water! I have been here since one o’clock yesterday—since one o’clock! My God, it is nearly twenty hours, and my lips are glued together.”Another opened his vest and showed a jagged wound upon which the blood had congealed.“They are slow up yonder, but then they are not in pain, Herr Major. As for me, I do not count. I shall never stand again.”“Do not talk so,” cried an old sergeant, whose arm had been scarred and broken by a shell from Froeschweiler; “we have our duty to do, and all this is nothing. The doctor will laugh at us for troubling him. A cigar would cure me, Herr Major—ah, you are all too kind to a useless old man.”Brandon distributed his cigars among them, and called to a trooper to fetch them water from the village and to send the ambulance. The place wherein they lay was a very pit of blood andagony; he turned from it quickly when he saw the white face of the girl at his side. He knew that she had all the desire and pity to serve them, and he understood the helplessness she realised and blamed.“It is a doctor’s work, Beatrix—you would only make things worse. The ambulance will be here just now, and they have already been looked after in some sort of way, as you see. You need a lot of training to stand this sort of thing, and remember you have had none at all—”He stopped abruptly, for there were tears in her eyes.“Brandon,” she said quickly, “do you not despise me—”“Because you are not a doctor? Certainly not—”“No, not for that, but for all that I have been talking about. As if anything mattered when those poor fellows suffer! And I am doing nothing, nothing. I have never done anything all my life—”“You can begin now by going back to Madame Hélène. She is alone in Strasburg. She will have need of you in the days to come. I am afraid they will be terrible days, Beatrix.”“Why should they be, Brandon?”“Because we march to-day.”Something of the strange circumstance of their association came in that moment to both of them. For the first time she read a suspicion of the whole truth in the look he turned upon her, but she would not think of it nor debate it in her mind lest that should be in itself a dishonour. After all, he was her husband’s friend. She would trust her life to him, and Edmond would applaud her confidence.“I will go to Strasburg now,” she said quickly. “If only I can hear of Edmond there!”“If that is all,” he said, “I will bring you the news myself.”She laughed.“They would shoot you for a spy,” she said.
Theyfound a haven of refuge for her in the house of the curé of Morsbronn, and she slept there until the sun was shining upon Wörth again. It was odd to wake in that little white bedroom, and to find herself wrapped about with the cloak of a Hessian dragoon, and to hear the voices of men busy in the rooms below, and those other sounds of squadrons marching and of guns rolling by to Strasburg and the West. She could not, for a little while, recall the means by which she had come to the house; neither was there any clear memory of yesterday, nor of its events. When she looked from the window, out upon the high road, she could see a red cross flying from the pillar of the garden gates, and everywhere, on the heights above and in the valley below, the spiked helmets glistened in the sunshine. These indomitable Prussians were the masters of Wörth, then! The glorious army of yesterday—that army which was to defend the homes of France—it was an army no more. A sense of her utter helplessness took possession of her anew. Sheremembered, one by one, the circumstances she had forgotten. They had burned her house. Edmond was a prisoner. Brandon North had brought her to the priest’s cottage, and would come again at dawn to put her on the road to Strasburg. She must return to her friends, he had said. Wörth was no longer a fit place for her.
He came at eight o’clock, and waited for her in the garden of the cottage. She could hardly believe, even yet, that this great fellow, in the dark green uniform, was the same Brandon who had been her English friend in Strasburg. A new dignity was the soldier’s gift to him. The invincible might of Germany, the victory of the Saxon, were so many sops to his own ambition. He spoke to her almost as a brother, and, for the first time, she had a certain awe of him.
“I’m sorry to be troublesome,” he said, when he saw her at the window of the room; “we march in half an hour, and if you can be ready, an Englishman here, who is driving to Hagenau, will take you in his cart. Do you think you can manage it?”
“You still believe that I ought to go?”
“Well—it’s for you to say. If you want to stop at Wörth an hour longer than you can help, I shall be surprised. That’s all.”
She nodded her head, and began to make a hurried toilet. Upon going downstairs, she found the priest standing before the door of his sitting-room, and barring it to her. A forgotten candle guttered in a stick upon a table; and there were bloody bandages and a tumbler of water beside it. Low moaning sounds came from the apartment, and even there, in the hall, a dark crimson stain gave sanctity to the boards. She knew then that some of the wounded men were in the house; and even while she stood they carried in a dying cuirassier, and she could look for an instant into that charnel-house, where the living sat with the dead, and the aftermath of war was being reaped.
“This way, Madame, this way,” the old man cried imploringly; “those poor fellows—we can help them only with our prayers. They have been coming here all night. Ah, that we should see such sights; that God should permit men to do these things!”
He took her by the hand and led her through the kitchen of the house. There were German officers there, a merry party, hardened to the scenes about, and careless in its talk of victory and of advance. The men bowed to her as she passed, for they understood that she was the English friend of the “Herr Major.” In the garden she found Brandon waiting by his horse. The thoughtcame to her that it was good to have such a friend in such a place. There was no question of the “might be” where the Prussians stood.
“Oh,” she said, shuddering still with horror of the house, “how good it is to breathe again! Have you been waiting long, Brandon?”
“I was up here at six, but they told me you were asleep. You must be tired enough after yesterday, and you’ll have a long day. I didn’t want to wake you, but it was necessary if you are to come with us. Of course you will come. There’s not a house in Wörth fit for a dog just now. We can make a road if you’ll go in Watts’s cart. He’s an eccentric old fellow, attached to one of the New York papers—though he’s an Englishman for all that. I told him that you were an Englishwoman and had friends in Strasburg, and he’s only too pleased to help. I dare say he’ll drive you right into the town. Don’t mind his bluntness. He’s a regular old Bohemian, and not a sham one made in an alehouse. It will be best for you to stay there with Madame Hélène, or to go down into Switzerland, as you please; but, if you take my advice, Beatrix, you won’t stop a day longer in the Place Kleber than you can help. You see for yourself what’s going to happen. And Strasburg won’t be a pleasant place when von Werder calls there.”
He spoke to her with a certain intimacy of friendship, as though they two stood apart from this quarrel of nations, and had a common interest elsewhere, in their nationality and their circumstances. She heard him in that spirit; but her own future was no concern to her. At Strasburg, among her friends—at Madame Hélène’s house—all would be well there.
“Of course I shall go,” she said; “it’s very good of you to trouble so much, and Edmond will be grateful. He would not look for me anywhere else when he comes back. If I could only be sure that they are treating him well.”
She laughed at herself for the naïve confession, and corrected it instantly.
“You are a Prussian,” she said. “I forgot that. And you never told us—”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“My father made his home in Germany. I offered myself for the service. A man cannot always look at life through empty wine-bottles. Buying and selling are not altogether intellectual pursuits, you will admit. If I had thought that there was any backbone on the other side, I might have gone there on a sporting impulse. All that appealed to me—order, method, strength, iron will—is the property of the Saxon. We may not like it, but we must not dispute it. And I ought not to say such things to you, who are waiting for breakfast. Have you ever breakfasted in camp before, Beatrix?”
He began to lead his horse away from the priest’s cottage to the bivouac of dragoons, and put the question as he went. This half-hour of a subtle and satisfying intimacy might never return. He rejoiced in the comradeship, but from other motives than those which gave her pleasure in it. And she would remember only that she had found a friend.
“No,” she said, looking up to him frankly. “I am a soldier’s wife, and I know nothing about soldiers. If your order and your method and your iron will could help some of these poor people who die in the fields, I would think more of the Saxon. You can never make good the evil of yesterday, never, never, Brandon. What is it in us all that makes us callous to suffering as we are now? When a trooper was killed at Niederbronn a week ago, it was as though one of my own servants had died in our garden. I thought of the poor fellow all night, and prayed for him. Yesterday the dead were everywhere, and we passed them by as though they had been stones. Is it ‘backbone’ that gives us the courage to look at things always through the glasses of self? Why, at this very minute, ought not I to be asking myself how I can help Edmond, and not how I can get to Strasburg?”
He laughed at the unconscious conceit of her thought.
“You can help your husband best by keeping out of harm’s way,” he said. “We are not savages, Beatrix, nor cannibals either, for that matter. Edmond is all the better where he is. He won’t be killed, anyway, and everyone is talking of his fellows and their charge yesterday. Whatever may happen to the rank and file, the officers will be well treated, be sure of that. I wouldn’t mind being in their place at all. They’ll have good quarters, and plenty to eat and drink. When the war’s over—and that’s a matter of a few weeks at the most—they’ll come back whole men, and not as those poor fellows yonder. Is there anything to make you sorry in that prospect?”
They had entered the field of the bivouac then, and he pointed to a row of wounded infantrymen, sitting beneath a tottering wall, which was the last upstanding mark where, yesterday, a prosperous farm had been. All the men were badly hurt, yet all bore their sufferings with unflinching patience. War had obliterated a memory of their nationality. A great Würtemberger nursed the head of a maimed chasseur, and a gunner of France did his best to bind up the shattered hand of one of von Werder’s men. Faint and wan and unattended,these poor fellows made a brave attempt to salute when the officer approached them; nor did one of them utter so much as a single word of complaint.
“Come,” said Brandon, desiring to put a bright face upon it, “and who is looking after your breakfasts, my poor fellows?”
“Ah, Herr Major, if it were so much as a drink of water! I have been here since one o’clock yesterday—since one o’clock! My God, it is nearly twenty hours, and my lips are glued together.”
Another opened his vest and showed a jagged wound upon which the blood had congealed.
“They are slow up yonder, but then they are not in pain, Herr Major. As for me, I do not count. I shall never stand again.”
“Do not talk so,” cried an old sergeant, whose arm had been scarred and broken by a shell from Froeschweiler; “we have our duty to do, and all this is nothing. The doctor will laugh at us for troubling him. A cigar would cure me, Herr Major—ah, you are all too kind to a useless old man.”
Brandon distributed his cigars among them, and called to a trooper to fetch them water from the village and to send the ambulance. The place wherein they lay was a very pit of blood andagony; he turned from it quickly when he saw the white face of the girl at his side. He knew that she had all the desire and pity to serve them, and he understood the helplessness she realised and blamed.
“It is a doctor’s work, Beatrix—you would only make things worse. The ambulance will be here just now, and they have already been looked after in some sort of way, as you see. You need a lot of training to stand this sort of thing, and remember you have had none at all—”
He stopped abruptly, for there were tears in her eyes.
“Brandon,” she said quickly, “do you not despise me—”
“Because you are not a doctor? Certainly not—”
“No, not for that, but for all that I have been talking about. As if anything mattered when those poor fellows suffer! And I am doing nothing, nothing. I have never done anything all my life—”
“You can begin now by going back to Madame Hélène. She is alone in Strasburg. She will have need of you in the days to come. I am afraid they will be terrible days, Beatrix.”
“Why should they be, Brandon?”
“Because we march to-day.”
Something of the strange circumstance of their association came in that moment to both of them. For the first time she read a suspicion of the whole truth in the look he turned upon her, but she would not think of it nor debate it in her mind lest that should be in itself a dishonour. After all, he was her husband’s friend. She would trust her life to him, and Edmond would applaud her confidence.
“I will go to Strasburg now,” she said quickly. “If only I can hear of Edmond there!”
“If that is all,” he said, “I will bring you the news myself.”
She laughed.
“They would shoot you for a spy,” she said.