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[Illustration: She Gave a Quick, Grateful Sob.]
Captain Lucy in the Home Sector
Captain Lucy In The Home Sector
By
Aline Havard
_Author of_
CAPTAIN LUCY IN FRANCE
CAPTAIN LUCY AND LIEUTENANT BOB
CAPTAIN LUCY’S FLYING ACE
ILLUSTRATED BY
Ralph P. Coleman
The Penn Publishing Company
Philadelphia
1921
Introduction
If the young people who read this last story of Lucy Gordon’s army life
are disappointed that the end of the war does not bring her home to
America they cannot possibly be as disappointed as she herself. She
hoped that the war had really finished with the armistice but, like lots
of us, she found that there was a great deal left to do that she had not
counted upon. Peace was slow in coming, and the American army overseas
had its hands as full trying to hasten it as all America on this side
had, and still has, in trying to get back to peace-time ways.
The tangle of affairs in war-swept Europe is more than Lucy can
understand, though she sees a little of that great unrest, and catches a
glimpse of its hidden dangers, even in the Home Sector.
She does what she can to help, generously, and, though peace is not come
and America is still distant, she and Bob and all the Gordon family find
happiness together, and look forward with brave confidence to the
glorious future of the dear country to which they will before long be
homeward bound.
Aline Havard.
Contents
I. Along the Rhine 9
II. Franz and His Family 28
III. Scouting on the Dwina 48
IV. The Silly Ass 69
V. From Russia into Germany 96
VI. The Mystery of the Forest 117
VII. Alan Takes a Hand 137
VIII. For Adelheid 159
IX. Bob and Elizabeth 182
X. A Letter to Franz 204
XI. With Larry’s Aid 226
XII. Unknown To History 249
XIII. Across the Channel 272
XIV. A Midsummer Night’s Dream 289
Illustrations
She Gave a Quick, Grateful Sob _Frontispiece_
He Waved the Flaming Streamers About His
Head 65
Larry Stood With Lucy by the Door 127
Lucy Read the Few Lines of German 217
“Here She Is,” Bob Answered 304
CHAPTER I
ALONG THE RHINE
The Home Sector,—that was what Larry Eaton called it, a little irony
beneath his irrepressible cheerfulness, when he had been ordered to
Coblenz with the American Army of Occupation. He had called it so with
his eyes on the Stars and Stripes already floating over the general’s
headquarters in the old German city, and after a sidelong glance at Lucy
Gordon’s sober face. “It’s the first step on the way home, Lucy,” he
said, as the two walked along the grassy banks of the river, the pale
December sunlight shining on the water and, at their left, on the low
houses at the outskirts of Coblenz. “Don’t look so downhearted, old
pal.”
Lucy smiled and shook off her depression. It was hard ever to be gloomy
for long in Larry’s company. The young aviator had something invincibly
gay and hopeful in his nature, and a philosophic acceptance of things,
until they could be bettered, that often quieted Lucy’s rebellious
moments. “I’m not downhearted, Larry,” she protested. “At least not
very. But I did want to go home,—not after a while, you know, but right
away, when the armistice was signed. I know it’s wonderful to be at
peace, and to have Father safe and stationed here, but,—I don’t care
very much about living in Germany.”
“Don’t you?” asked Larry, laughing. “As Beattie would say, you’re jolly
right.”
“And there’s no use thinking we’ll all be together,” Lucy persisted.
“Even though Father has his quarters here and Mother will finish her
work and come, where will Bob be?”
“Scouting over the Bolshevik lines in the frozen north,” said Larry, a
tinge of envy in his voice. “I’d change with him if I could.”
“Would you? Oh, Larry, I should think you’d had enough.”
“So we have, but so long as there’s fighting to be done I’d rather be
there than cooling my heels along the Rhine. And our men aren’t having
an easy time,—that poor little force at Archangel.”
“Oh, I know there’s lots of work to do!” Lucy exclaimed, suddenly roused
from her childish depression, and involuntarily she opened the woolen
cape she wore and glanced at her nurse’s aide’s uniform. “I’ll stop
growling and try to help.”
“I don’t think you’ll have much trouble doing it,” said Larry, smiling
down at her, “judging by what you’ve done so far. Only this time you’ll
have an easier job of it,—no prisoners to set free. You can’t imagine a
peacefuller spot than that little hospital you’re going to. It’s lost in
the forest, and even the village near it looks half asleep and as though
it might tumble any minute down the hillside.”
“The peacefuller it is the better I’ll like it,” said Lucy with
something of a sigh. “I’ve had enough of war.”
Although General Gordon was stationed with the Fifth Army Headquarters
in Coblenz, where already, a month after the armistice, American troops
had taken possession of houses in the German city and were preparing for
their long stay in the occupied territory, Lucy herself was still on
duty elsewhere. With the end of the fighting, need for war workers of
all sorts had not grown less. Mrs. Gordon could not yet leave her
hospital at Cannes, and Lucy had been urged to keep on as nurse’s aide
with an insistence that could not but fill her with honest pride and
satisfaction. The army surgeons spoke to her of the increasing need of
nurses among the convalescents, and Miss Pearse frankly begged Lucy not
to abandon her.
“You can go to Coblenz in the spring, Lucy dear,” the young nurse
persuaded, when new plans and changes of base occupied every mind in the
joyful week after the armistice. “We have to garrison Coblenz for
fifteen years, they say, so your father will probably be there a good
while. But perhaps he won’t,” she added, smiling at Lucy’s face, grown
disconsolate at her words. “Anyway, while you’re over here I know you’d
sooner be helping. There’s almost more to do than ever. The men have
been rather let down by the war’s end and all the delays following. They
don’t know what to do with themselves, especially the wounded who are
slow in getting well. We’ve got to give them a Christmas that will
stifle their homesickness a little. And I can’t half work without you,
Lucy. I’m so used to having my little aide to call on. You’ll stay,
won’t you?”
This was not the sort of persuasion Lucy could resist, when her heart
was already in the work that she had learned in such a hard school of
suffering and anxiety. She eagerly consented to follow Miss Pearse
wherever her father would allow her to go, which ended by being a little
convalescent hospital outside the village of Badheim, ten miles west of
Coblenz on the banks of the Moselle. Cold breezes from the two rivers
swept it, and the air was pure and sweet with the odor of pine. After
the shell-torn villages of France, Badheim hospital, as Miss Pearse
described it, seemed lovely and inviting to Lucy in its woodland
stillness. Yet something, she felt, would keep her from yielding to its
peaceful spell: it was a part of Germany. It was unspoiled because
France was desolate. She could not forget this long enough to look about
her at any German landscape with untroubled eyes.
Even now, walking with Larry along the Rhine, she watched the smooth
flow of the river and looked across at the vineyard-clad slopes and at
the great old fortress towering opposite Coblenz with coolly critical
gaze. All at once she turned to Larry, with sudden recollection that
this was her last day of freedom and perhaps her last chance in weeks of
talking with Bob’s friend, to ask longingly:
“Larry, can’t you tell me anything more of what Bob is doing at
Archangel? He doesn’t write much about his work, and the letters are so
slow. I know it’s hard up there. And they don’t get ahead. The
Bolsheviki are strong.”
“Our force is hardly of a size to accomplish much. It ought to be enough
men or none,” declared Larry, with the troubled, puzzled look that
sometimes came over his face, making him look extraordinarily sober and
thoughtful by contrast with his usual cool cheerfulness. “But don’t
worry too much about Bob,” he added, putting aside the doubts which had
made him speak so earnestly. “He’s doing scouting work. He’s far safer
than he was on the German front. The cold is the disagreeable part.”
“I know. I’ve knitted him everything I thought he could pile on. He
doesn’t say much about it, but I looked up Archangel on the map and,
Larry, it’s near the North Pole.”
“Not quite, but I won’t say it’s a pleasant climate. Perhaps they won’t
stay there much longer.”
“Well, I thought on Armistice Day that it was over, really over,—the
war, I mean. But here it seems to be tailing out in every direction.”
“Yes, it has rather a nasty way of refusing to be finished,” Larry
agreed, looking around him as he spoke at the passers-by, for they were
now re-entering the town. “To judge by their manner these Boches seem to
think it’s quite over and that we’re friends again. Yet some of them,
I’m sure, are very far from feeling that way.”
“What do you really think?” asked Lucy curiously. “They smile at us and
are eager to sell things. But Larry, how can they feel friendly?”
“I can’t fathom them,” said Larry, not much given to analyzing character
at any time. “Most of them seem spiritless enough, but I’ve seen a few
bitter looks, all the same, and some eyes that shone with hate at sight
of us. I don’t trust one of them.”
“Oh, they’ll have to take it out in hating us,” said Lucy easily. “They
can’t do any worse now.”
Lucy had had enough of plotting and conspiracy. She was determined to
put German treachery out of her mind and live in confident simplicity
once more.
“Fed-up with the war, eh, Lucy?” Captain Beattie had remarked, when Lucy
and the young Britisher met by chance in Cantigny soon after the
armistice. “Well, you know, I rather am myself. Let’s cross the Channel
and leave it all behind.”
And that was what Lucy longed to do, putting the Atlantic in place of
the Channel, in spite of trying to persuade herself of the contrary
after Miss Pearse’s urging. All through the war she had looked forward
to that day, the fighting ended, that would see the Gordon family on
board the first ship bound for America. Even adventurous spirits have
their homesick moments. Foreign sights and sounds had, while this mood
lasted, lost their charm for her. She looked around her now at the old
gabled houses of Coblenz, at the Germans passing, who paused to stare
with blank curiosity at the Americans, already a familiar part of the
city’s inhabitants, and she felt no sympathy with her surroundings.
“I’m going to bury myself in that forest and work so hard at the
hospital that I’ll forget I’m in Germany,” she told Larry, as they
neared the house commandeered for General Gordon’s quarters. “You might
come out and see me once in a while, though, Larry, and tell me how
peace is getting on.”
“I’ll be out every year or two and bring you the news,” Larry promised.
“Maybe I’ll feel the need of a little rest cure myself. I’m pretty well
exhausted.”
Lucy laughed as she met the blue twinkling eyes above his tanned cheeks.
An orderly opened the house door as Larry held out his hand in good-bye.
The following day Lucy joined Miss Pearse and half a dozen other Red
Cross workers to travel by motor-lorry to Badheim. The road ran along
the Moselle, a lovely woodland countryside which went far toward
bringing back Lucy’s lost serenity.
“I love the country, don’t you, Miss Pearse?” she said, breathing deep
breaths of the piney air. “I should think sick men would get well
quickly here.”
“I hope they will,” the young nurse responded. “But I’m sure they’d get
well quicker if these woods were in Maine or in Michigan,—anywhere at
home.”
Her voice betrayed her and Lucy looked at her friend with a quick thrill
of sympathy. Miss Pearse was as homesick as she herself, in spite of her
stoic calm. And, meeting the glance of an orderly who sat on a case of
supplies in one corner of the lorry, Lucy read the same longing in his
eyes even before he exclaimed almost involuntarily, “Or not even woods
or rivers, Miss. Just the docks at Hoboken would look good enough to
me.”
The little village of Badheim was perched upon a hillside, the road
winding at its foot. The lorry turned sharply away from the Moselle to
begin a long climb up a heavily wooded slope. The forest now closed in
on both sides,—majestic oaks, mixed with pines and hemlocks which sang
and murmured as the river breeze swept over them. Rabbits darted across
the road and squirrels chattered in the overhanging branches. All at
once the hospital appeared, a big frame building in a clearing near the
top of the hill, its roof in spreading gables, like a Swiss chalet, and
the Stars and Stripes floating over it.
Behind it were half a dozen cottages for the staff. The whole had a
weather-beaten look, for it had stood there more than fifty years, and
an air of solitude enveloped it, as though it were much further removed
from town and village than it really was. Lucy decided in one glance
that it needed sunlight and cheerful voices to keep from being a gloomy
spot where the murmur of the swaying pines would change to sighs of
loneliness.
In fact the convalescent soldiers seated on the verandas or strolling
over the grassy clearing and in the borders of the woodland looked sober
and purposeless, their idle steps leading vaguely from one spot to the
other, without any spur of hopeful energy. Lucy understood at last Miss
Pearse’s eloquent persuasions, and seeing how sorely help was needed
here, she forgot her own repinings and was herself again.
Miss Pearse and Lucy installed themselves in a room in one of the
cottages beside the hospital,—a sort of shed built of heavy unpainted
planks, with sloping roof and leaded window-panes. A stove fed with
pine-boughs warmed the drafty interior somewhat from the December cold.
While the two newcomers were unpacking and settling themselves in their
narrow quarters the hospital’s head nurse came in and talked to them,
dropping down on the nearest chair to do so; for she was tired and glad
of a moment’s rest.
“You will think there is terrible confusion here, for we are all at
loose ends,” she told them. “We haven’t enough nurses nor orderlies, and
nothing is in smooth running order. I hope you won’t mind, for a few
weeks, not having a regular routine but doing whatever presents itself.”
“That will just suit me,” remarked Lucy, brushing her corn-colored hair
before the little mirror. “Send me on all the errands you can think of,
Miss Webster.”
The head nurse laughed, looking kindly at Lucy’s pretty face, lighted by
the smile that her unaffectedness made very attractive. “I’ll find
plenty for you to do, don’t worry,” she said confidently. “When nothing
else turns up, go about among the convalescents and talk to them of
home.”
“Are there bad cases here? What sort, mostly?” Miss Pearse asked.
“Some are men who have been gassed and their lungs are injured. Those
are the discouraged ones who think they can never get well. Then we have
a good many with broken limbs slowly mending, and some recovering from
pneumonia and trench fever. There are about eighty in all, and most of
them getting on splendidly, if they would only forget their homesickness
and that they must spend Christmas in Germany.”
“U-um, but it’s not so easy to forget that,” murmured Lucy,
understandingly. “And, though of course this hospital has fine air and
all that, it’s not a very cheerful place, do you think? With all these
German woods shutting it in?”
“German woods are just like any other woods, Lucy,” said Miss Pearse
laughing. “Don’t be making trouble. We’re ready now, Miss Webster.”
The hospital wards were nearly empty for a part of the day, during which
almost all the patients got up and sat on the verandas, or were wheeled
about if they could not walk. Lucy was surprised to see a good number of
French soldiers scattered among the Americans, and looking a good deal
more cheerful than her own countrymen, as though they knew that their
return home could not be much longer postponed.
Miss Webster explained to her: “These Frenchmen were in need of special
treatment—we have mineral baths here. Or else they were in American
hospitals and were brought along with other convalescents. They will
almost all go before Christmas.”
Lucy was put to work in the diet kitchen, which she left at lunch time
to carry trays to those of the convalescents whose capricious appetites
needed special encouragement. The trays were numbered and so were the
chairs in which the invalids reclined, but as Lucy, carrying a tray
holding chicken broth and biscuits and numbered forty-five, approached
the chair bearing that number, the occupant got up and, walking slowly
down the veranda steps, strolled off toward the edge of the clearing.
The man was a French officer, a blond of tall and powerful build, though
now his blue uniform hung loosely on his shrunken frame and his slow
steps were a trifle uncertain. Lucy put down the tray and ran after him,
calling out, “_Quarante-cinq! Quarante-cinq!_” Then as she neared him
and saw the insignia on his uniform she changed her form of address to,
“_Monsieur le capitaine! Attendez, s’il vous plait?_”
The Frenchman turned around and seeing Lucy pointing with expressive
gesture to the veranda where the soup was cooling on the deserted chair
he smiled and took off his cap, saying with quick apology, “_Pardon,
Mademoiselle_.” Then changing into good English he continued, “I am
sorry to have made you follow me. Thank you very much.”
Lucy walked beside him in silence, stealing glances at his face in
puzzled amazement. Where had she seen that face before? It was not
really familiar, yet she knew beyond a doubt that she had seen the man
and spoken to him and, more than that, at a moment of great fear and
anxiety. Almost a shiver caught her now at the dim remembrance. Where
had it been?
“You have just arrived here, Mademoiselle?” the officer inquired,
turning pleasantly toward her.
All at once Lucy knew. She saw in her mind’s eye the de la Tours’ little
house in Château-Plessis, the German soldier entering the dining-room
and Michelle’s cry of joy and terror.
“Captain de la Tour!” she exclaimed in vivid recollection, and as the
officer looked at her in surprise she went eagerly on, “You don’t
remember me? Of course not—how could you? I’m Michelle’s friend, Lucy
Gordon. I was in your mother’s house when you came into Château-Plessis
as a spy. For a moment I couldn’t remember. Oh, tell me, how is
Michelle?”
The Frenchman looked at her closely, his blue eyes shining with
pleasure. “I remember you now, Mademoiselle! And that day—will I ever
forget it! I am happy to see you, my sister’s very dear friend.” He held
out his hand as he spoke—a thin, bony hand from which fever had taken
the strength and firmness. “Can you stay a moment? I will give you good
news of Michelle.”
“A moment, yes. But don’t let your soup get cold,” said Lucy, handing
him the little tray as he sank down on his chair again, breathing hard.
“And your mother—is she well, too?”
“Not very well, but nevertheless she thinks more of her absent son than
of her own health. I am not able to go home, they say, and _Maman_ fears
I shall be lonely at this season, in spite of my kind American friends.
She and Michelle are coming to Badheim for the Noël.”
At this Lucy was struck so speechless with delight there was a pause
before she could put into words her joyful amazement. “Coming here? Oh,
Captain de la Tour, isn’t it good news? I can’t tell you—you can’t guess
how glad I am!”
Lucy’s hazel eyes sparkled with the words and her whole face lighted up.
Perhaps never until that moment had she realized the place Michelle held
in her heart. Now at this lucky chance to review in peace and security
the friendship woven among such sad and peril-haunted days she felt a
thrill of happiness that raised her spirits almost to their old-time
level.
Captain de la Tour watched her with quick sympathy, his pale lips
touched for an instant by the brief, radiant smile which could so
strikingly change both his and Michelle’s faces from their thoughtful
gravity. Lucy longed to ask all about her friend, of whom she had caught
so short a glimpse on the eleventh of November, but she had not another
moment to spare. “When will they come?” she lingered to ask.
“This week, I think. I am waiting every day to hear,” said Captain de la
Tour, his voice filled with eager hope. “I have not seen them since the
war ended. I was shot through the lungs the day of the armistice.”
When the luncheon hour was over Miss Pearse said to Lucy, “This is a
good chance to do what Miss Webster asked me to find time for. She wants
us to go with the orderlies to the spring in the forest and see to the
bottling of the water. It won’t take long.”
Lucy was thinking so much about all she would have to tell Michelle that
she hardly noticed what Miss Pearse said, but followed her in obedient
silence across the clearing behind the hospital and into the woodland.
In front of them went two Hospital Corps men drawing hand-carts filled
with empty bottles.
There was no snow yet on the ground and, beneath the trees, it was
carpeted with moss and pine needles so that footsteps were hushed and
the sigh of the branches overhead made so deep and steady a murmur that
the forest seemed all at once to have an atmosphere of its own. A great
peace pervaded it so that even the soldiers spoke involuntarily in low
tones, and glanced about them with a kind of solemnity at the tall
trunks of the firs and hemlocks, with here and there an oak spreading
its wide, bare branches. The sunlight shone down with a golden gleam
into the dim greenness of forest aisles stretching endlessly on every
side.
Lucy walked on in enchanted silence. She thought she had never known
anything more lovely than this murmurous stillness, the soft carpet
beneath her feet, the great evergreen trees closing in around her and
the cold, pine-laden air against her face. The mysterious scamper of shy
woodland bird and beast delighted her. She would not have guessed that
they had gone a hundred yards when, after half a mile’s walk, they came
out suddenly into another big clearing, near the center of which stood a
little cottage built of unplaned logs, its roof covered with pine boughs
and smoke rising from its earthen chimney.
“It looks like a fairy story,” said Lucy softly, remembering Elizabeth’s
old forest tales.
The soldiers led the way along the clearing’s edge for a hundred yards
and then reëntered the forest. Almost at once the sound of water
tumbling over stones broke the stillness and a little spring came into
view, a bubbling basin with moss-lined, rocky bottom, and beside it a
tiny rustic shed, its door fastened with a rusty padlock.
“That little shed held the bottling machine the Germans used,” Miss
Pearse explained to Lucy as the men began to unload their carts, “but it
got out of order toward the end of the war, so for a few weeks we shall
have to bottle by hand. We are supposed to supervise but it’s quicker
work if we help.”
All four knelt down on the mossy earth and began dipping up the spring
water with ladles and pouring it through funnels into the big
water-bottles. The spring bubbled up unceasingly, so crystal clear that
no disturbance of the water could keep the rocky bottom from showing
always in trembling outline.
“This is a mineral spring,” said Miss Pearse, setting aside a filled
bottle which looked empty in its clearness. “The water is as wonderful
as this forest air. Hello, who’s this?”
A little girl five or six years old had crept silently up to the spring
and was standing with big blue eyes fixed on the Americans. Her flaxen
braids hung over her faded print dress, a ragged red shawl was clutched
about her and her feet were thrust into clumsy sabots above which her
stockings were slipping down. An uncertain smile that began to dimple
her pink cheeks broadened as she met Lucy’s friendly eyes.
“_Guten tag_,” she murmured shyly.
And “_Guten tag_,” repeated a man’s voice as the fir branches were
brushed aside. A big German, close to middle age, blond and deeply
sunburned, ax in hand, stood behind the child, his keen eyes fixed on
the workers, a touch of sourness about his lips, though he spoke
pleasantly enough.
Lucy looked up at him and the enchantment of the great old forest, of
the bubbling spring and the soft-footed little girl vanished in that one
glance. She was back again in Germany.