The last case in Bonsecours' unit had just been lifted from the table.
Swathed in bandages it was laid once more upon a stretcher and carried
rearward to a waiting ambulance whose racks would then be filled.
Carefully, to spare his charges added pain, the driver engaged the
clutch and started, but in so vile a condition was this road that the
heavily loaded machine plunged as a mired horse. Yet there were no
groans. Teeth might have been grit within that canopy of suffering, but
the men were too game to make an outcry.
A nurse having come as far as the ambulance, now gave a stifled sob as
she watched it lumber, like a huge beetle, over the uneven terrain. Her
arms stiffened and her hands closed into little brown fists--for she
knew too well what those bumps and plunges were doing to the lacerated
human freight!
Standing alone upon a mound of earth and staring after it, her face
touched by the amber glow of a westering sun that hung as an immense
orange in the smoke of battle, all of Hillsdale would have gasped at her
amazing beauty. For the mere prettiness which they had known, enhanced
by happiness and laughter, was now transformed. As the chisel of Michael
Angelo first carved but a placid face for the Mary in his masterful
Pieta, and later gnawed into it shadows of pain and love until it became
a part of God, so had the chisel of suffering humanity brought out the
wonderful character which had been a latent part of this Nurse Marian.
Her figure, while always the embodiment of grace, though attuned to the
easy things of life, now stood as if it were akin to war's great sinew.
She seemed indeed to be an ivory column of strength and softness, of
support and beauty, of courage and tenderness.
In another minute she turned and went back to the dressing-stations
where there was much cleaning up to be done--or as much as could be
done--before the next stretcher arrived. Yet it did not come. The room,
the table, the instruments had been put in order; the great Bonsecours
sat resting on a box, and the other nurses had stepped outside the
entrance, furtively watching. It seemed incredible that in all the
head-splitting noises so near to them there should not be wounded men
for the gathering!
"I don't understand it," he arose and crossed to Marian. "But, surely,
some will be here soon!"--for, unlike Barrow's unit stationed a hundred
yards away, his orderlies and assistants had been trained in many
battles. There could be only one answer if they remained out much
longer!--and he would then go himself, to fetch his own cases. He had
done it many times before, which was one of the reasons the French army
worshipped him.
"I'll run up and look," she cried.
"No, I'm afraid," he said.
"The great Bonsecours afraid?" she laughed--for, no matter how tired her
own body might feel, she always managed to laugh when he showed signs of
great fatigue.
"Afraid I could not live if anything happened to you, _mon chere_," he
murmured.
A startled look flashed into her eyes, slightly different than that
caused by the excitement of battle. Many weeks ago her intuition had
measured the strength of this man's love for her, and had seen with
unerring accuracy his honorable resistance to its pleading, when, during
temporary lulls in their work, he might have spoken. That he had said
this much now, indicated an overpowering mental and physical exhaustion.
Even as she realized this, he realized his weakness, and hastened to
add:
"I will go; you must stay inside."
"No, no," she sprang between him and the dug-out entrance. "You are so
tired! I know you've not slept for two days!"
"Have you?" he smiled at her.
"Lots!" she lied--and he knew she lied. "I want you to rest--you owe it
to them out there! It will take only a second for me to run up and have
one peep!--there's no danger in that, and I can tell you if they're
coming!"
"It will bring them no sooner," he sighed, sinking back again upon the
box, "and there is danger--plenty of it."
Almost immediately he was asleep. She looked at him tenderly for a
moment, then ran into the quadrangle, turning and following the steep
path which led to the high ground above the dug-outs.
The scene beyond, as she now crouched and peered over the crest, was
what she might have expected--yet one can never become quite used to
such pictures as that! Below was the first-line trench, deserted since
the third division had been sent forward, and its emptiness gave her a
feeling of insecurity. She would have preferred a visual line of
stalwart fellows between her and the maddened enemy, instead of one that
had gone into the smoke. She looked back to see if another division were
coming up, but the intervening world seemed destitute of habitation,
save along the smoke-fringed horizon where French artillery spoke. Once
more she turned to the empty trench, her face perplexed and somewhat
frightened.
Just ahead lay the No Man's Land of eight hours ago; the new one for
tomorrow had not yet been plotted out, but would doubtless lie a mile or
so nearer the Rhine. Her staring eyes then caught and held two men,
walking tandem, and she knew they carried a stretcher. They were two
hundred yards away, obscured by smoke, and coming slowly. For an instant
she glanced over the field hoping to discover others, and, on looking
back, was amazed to find that the first were nowhere in sight. The air
was already more or less thick with death, and she gasped at the thought
of what their disappearance must mean.
Indifferent to the warning of Bonsecours--whom she knew would never
hesitate were he in her place--she ran swiftly down to the trench,
kneeled on the narrow bridge and frantically called in the hope that
some one, slightly wounded or ill, perhaps, had been left behind who now
might help her. But the solitude was ghastly. She called again and
again, screaming that some of her unit had been shelled with the man
they were bringing in. The pity of this seemed infinitely worse than the
wounding of combatants; yet the ditch remained utterly devoid of
life--the only answer she seemed to catch was that it waited merely to
embrace the dead. Without giving a further thought to dangers, she
sprang up and ran out across the field.
Going breathlessly, she watched for a glimpse of the brown stretcher.
Prone bodies might not have guided her aright, for there were several of
these; but the point she sought would have a stretcher, and there had
been no other stretchers within sight. Then she came upon it. Hastings
lay as he had fallen. One hand still grasped the handle--it was his left
hand, the side whereon he wore the Red Cross emblem. Quick tears blinded
her, but she brushed them away and kneeled by the wounded soldier. He
lived, although merciful unconsciousness had come to him. She looked
hastily around to see--at the same time wanting not to see--where the
other man had fallen, and shuddered when she realized that he must have
been blown to dust. The wounded soldier, then, was the only one here who
needed her! She started to roll him on the stretcher, intending to drag
it behind her and in this way sled him in; but its poles had been
shattered. She tried to lift him, and found that to be utterly
impossible.
The confusion was maddening out there upon that deserted No Man's Land.
To the dug-out openings, pointing away from it, noises had been
partially tempered; certainly the acrid smoke was less down in the
quadrangle, and she had therefore not been prepared for quite such a
cataclysm. Now a shell burst within fifty feet of her, providentially
first burrowing, but sending a fountain of earth into the air that fell
upon her like hail. Another burst.
In desperation dragging the wounded soldier to a nearby crater she slid
him into it, and was about to follow when checked by a curious
sight--for a man crouched there with his face against the side. One
could have died in that position, yet this man lived because his body
trembled visibly. Encircling his sleeve was the band of the Red Cross,
and upon seeing this she leaped down to him, asking fearfully:
"Are you badly wounded?"
He did not look around, and she laid a hand gently on his arm, not
daring to touch it firmly lest it be shattered.
"Tell me," she began again, in a louder voice, "are you badly wounded?"
Slowly he turned a face matted with sweat and powdered earth, haggard,
as though it had been drawn up from a grave. She uttered a wild scream
of recognition.
"Jeb!"
Her eyes opened to him. They suggested fluid-vague sympathies and fears
that many a man would have bartered his life for; but this one before
her only stared back with a look that was hardly sane, then turned again
to the crater wall. He seemed to be stunned; without feeling, indeed,
because dust and grit were plastered on one of his eye-balls.
"Jeb," she screamed, horrified at this, "tell me quickly where you're
hurt!--oh, Jeb!"
He shook his head, muttering something she could not hear; but his
gesture implied a negative. At first she did not understand; she could
not reconcile this with the fact that he crouched inactive when wounded
men were gasping for relief.
"Not hurt?" she insisted, taking hold of his arm. "But you must be, Jeb!
You must be--to be _here_!"
Petulantly he shook off her hand; slowly she drew away from him,
beginning--yet fearing--to understand. "But you must be, Jeb! You must
be--to be _here_!"
"Help me, Jeb! There's a man behind you hit pretty hard!--help me get
him in!"
She had again reached out and taken hold of him, but this time he jerked
away, crying with his mouth against the earth:
"Let him stay! Only a fool would go out there!"
Her young eyes, already schooled in a realm of ravages that exists
beyond the ken of those who do not go to wars, grew suddenly older. They
seemed at last to have met a thing they could not look upon! They had
witnessed the dying of many men--but here was a dying soul! As she had
healed men, she now clutched for an heroic remedy in the hope of saving
this more precious thing than life. But first, pitifully pleading, with
her lips close to his ear, she asked:
"You _must_ be wounded! For the love of Christ tell me the shell blew
you here--that you didn't come willingly! Tell me even that you're
dying, Jeb, but not----"
She could not say it, and waited, while his silence answered. Forgetting
everything else she sprang to her feet and stepped back, her eyes
narrowing at what she had discovered to be under his uniform--or,
rather, not under it! In a panic she realized that here was a derelict
ship of manliness being irresistibly driven by a hurricane of Fear; that
a complete wreck was imminent unless she were the master-pilot. Her
cheeks were aflame with indignation, her body bending tensely forward
might have been a spring of steel set to release some instrument of
torture--and then she let the bolt descend like the wrath of furies.
With the smoke of shells sweeping over them, sometimes enveloping her
head and shoulders as though she were looking through a storm of anger,
she called on God to witness that he was a cringing coward. She stood
above him transformed into a superb though outraged figure of Liberty,
lashing him with words that at any other time her tongue would have
refused to speak; words, some of which she did not know the meaning but
had heard from the lips of suffering soldiers. Unconsciously she was
following the maxim of a famous officer who one day said to her that all
men are cowards somewhere, but brave everywhere if sufficiently
aroused; and now she brutally strove to bruise his soul, hysterically
telling herself that if it could be made to bleed it would become
purified.
Much of this, owing to her incoherence and the noise of battle--and,
perhaps, the chaotic tumult in his brain--was unheard; but some little
of it registered, for suddenly he turned upon his knees and stared at
her, as though his normal faculties were beginning to quicken. For half
a minute he stared. No words, no gestures, could have been as eloquent
as the look which burned from his pale, haggard face; it was as liquid
fire being poured upon the woman for whom he had once avowed a love, and
who now cursed him! The tableau, with its weird setting--her
condemnation as a whip of flame curled snake-like above his head--might
have been a picture put into life, and called "The Flagellation of a
Soul"! Then, clapping his hands to his ears, he bowed his head,
shrieking:
"Stop it! You hurt!"
"I intend to hurt," she cried down at him. "If you were in the Army
you'd be stood before the wall and shot for this!--maybe they'll do it
yet! Thank God, the people at home can't see you, you damnable coward!"
Yet with her next breath she was wailing to the torn world and tortured
air: "Tell me that I've lied! Oh, Jeb, tell me that I've lied!"
He pressed his face again into the powdered earth, and something about
his dogged attitude said that she was going too far. Her woman's
instinct sent this warning just in time, abruptly causing her to realize
that a self-esteem once crushed into complete abasement can never look
upon fellow man with its former level eyes--and she was here to save,
not to destroy! The crouching figure on whom she had inflicted a wound
without having done the slightest good, was, after all, a big,
imaginative child in a vast night, utterly unprepared by rearing and
training, psychology or properly directed thought, to cope with this
demon-carnival into which he had been projected. And why should not the
shell's concussion have stunned him into this sad plight?
Retrospection flickering as a shadow picture on the brain has more than
once averted tragedies. In the passing of a second she now saw two
long-ago scenes: one, his desperate and victorious fight with a boy who
had kicked her puppy; the other, neighbors rushing with blankets to a
nearby pond, calling that he had swum out and saved a drowning
lad--nearly perishing in the effort! While she stared, still horrified;
while shells rent the air, and dust and smoke half blinded her, a spirit
of maternalism began to plead for this one-time schoolmate--champion of
her little dog, life-saver to a comrade! What had she done but add to
the agony of one already agonized beyond his power to escape!
A great pity filled her soul, and her body seemed to become liquefied
into a tossing sea of tears. With a sob she bent over him and, as all
ages of womanhood instinctively understand, gently drew his head against
her breast.
"Oh, Jeb! Can't you pull yourself together? Won't you try to be a man?"
she asked fiercely.
He staggered up and backed against the crater, holding his hands out to
keep her off when she would have followed. But his cheeks had turned
from white to crimson, and his eyes flashed a holy, or an unholy, fire.
"I hope to God I never get back to-night," he cried hoarsely. "I hope to
God you'll never have to look at anything as despicable as I've been!"
It was he now who occupied the place of the mighty, and she the one who
felt like cowering. Turning savagely he all but tossed the unconscious
soldier to his shoulders, struggled up the shell hole and ran toward the
dressing-stations. Scarcely knowing that her feet touched ground, she
flew behind him; sobbing, laughing, wringing her hands--lifted by the
great storm of victory which swept her soul.
But at the deserted trench he stopped, laid his burden on the little
bridge and turned back.
"Jeb, take him all the way in," she pleaded, catching at his sleeve--but
he shook off her hand, yelling like a madman:
"You can get help from here!--don't touch me!--I ain't fit!"
The next instant he was dashing headlong into the smoke. Frantically she
screamed:
"Come back!--Jeb!--your unit!"
But she might have made the men on Mars hear as easily. Once she started
to run after him, yet the fruitlessness of such a chase--and, more
important still, the unconscious soldier's claim for aid--checked her.
Blinded by tears, she dashed up the road and down to the quadrangle,
staggered into the dug-out, and cried in a strange voice to Bonsecours:
"There's a man out there I can't bring in!"
He sprang up as if electrified. But her words had not alarmed him so
much as her appearance and, in desperation catching her by the
shoulders, he demanded:
"What has happened--tell me!"
"N--nothing," she sank upon the box, burying her face in her folded
arms. She was sobbing hysterically now, and nurses rarely did
this--until they snapped!
"Tell me!--tell me!" he cried, leaning over her, and fighting as he had
never fought to keep from holding her close to him. His heart had been
too nearly starved, his strength too nearly exhausted, to withstand a
scene like this. "If you pity me, tell me what has happened," he
implored.
She did not look up, but impulsively reached for one of his hands and
pressed it fiercely, almost savagely, against her cheek. This must have
been the comfort she needed, this touch of a man who was every inch a
man, because the sobs at once grew quiet; and, in full control of her
nerves, she arose, saying urgently:
"Quick! He's on the trench bridge!"
As in a dream, the great Bonsecours sprang out.