THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SHIELD
The _médecin major_ himself 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 those _blessés_ who 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 a _train
sanitaire_ would take them to the extreme rear. It was known the
_postes de_ _secours_ were 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 the _opérés_
before night. The _médecin chef_ himself came, at her report, to
see what was the matter. There were four others for whom she had
fears--_grands blessés_ all.
Belinda had no desire to make a record in healing the wounded who came
to her ward. Of course, it was very fine if _Madame la Directrice_
could report to headquarters that so many _blessés_ passed 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 the _Médaille Militaire_
over 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 the _médecin major_ more 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, to _Salle III_," ordered the _directrice_.
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.
The _brancardiers_ lifted 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 the _blessés_ she 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, these _sales étrangers_!" growled Erard. "_Nom de Dieu!_ that I
should serve the _cochon_! Why do they not let them die where they
fall? Or stick them with the bayonet, as they do our poor _poilus_ when
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 into _Salle III_ two 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 those _blessés_ who 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 in _Salle 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 benevolent _Américain_ was about to furnish money for an entire
hospital unit to the _Croix 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.