It was from Miss Meadows principally that Hamilton learned the details
of his rescue. It was from her that he learned, for instance, that it
was McCall who had helped the negro, Williams, to save his life. Where
was McCall? Meadows would not tell, although she hinted that it was
near-by. He guessed that it was in an adjoining ward and that she was
afraid that if she told him how close, he would attempt to visit him
before his full strength had returned. Meadows had heard part of the
story from McCall himself and part she remembered from a newspaper
account, although names of places and persons had been carefully
deleted. There were other details that Dr. Levin supplied.
Apparently Hamilton had proceeded beyond his objective and fallen
wounded at the edge of Chartreux Woods just before the enemy began
to lay down a box barrage upon it. Hamilton wondered how he had got
there. His last memory had been of advancing upon a line of trenches.
Chartreux Woods lay beyond and to the left.
“Probably out of your head,” explained Dr. Levin. “You know there was a
slight wound on your scalp. Probably a machine-gun bullet.”
“Must have been that,” agreed Hamilton. “Only an idiot would have done
it otherwise.”
At any rate, it seemed, Hamilton had reached the last line of trenches
assigned as his objective and, while his men were still mopping up, had
blundered on. At the edge of the forest, weak from loss of blood, he
had fallen.
It was there that McCall, whose company was lying entrenched opposite
the wood, ready to advance when the signal should come, saw him the
next morning, through the first gray of a drizzling dawn--the body of
an American soldier lying in the open a few feet from the first row of
trees and a hundred yards away. He did not know that it was Hamilton,
only that it was a wounded American. How should he guess that it was
Hamilton, who was supposed to be holding a position to the right and
rear of his own?
And now McCall had let himself lightly over the top and was running
swiftly through the mud toward his goal. Suddenly the barrage upon the
forest broke and McCall flung himself to the ground. In a general way
he knew that the lowness of the ground would probably shield him from
observation, but to expose himself needlessly would be folly. He began
to crawl forward slowly. He would continue this way for a few feet,
then dive into a shell hole or behind a stump.
Across the narrow field high explosive shells were shattering the
trees with thunderous roars. Projectiles screamed and whined overhead.
Somewhere a machine gun chattered. A light drizzle was falling and all
these sounds seemed like a thousand angry thunders following a thousand
devastating lightnings. Once McCall threw himself into a puddle a
second before a high explosive shell struck the earth a hundred yards
away with a terrible crash that shook the earth and spattered rock,
earth and metal as from a volcano’s mouth. McCall noticed with relief
that Hamilton lay protected by the sweep of the terrain.
McCall doggedly kept on. As he reached his goal, he saw for the first
time whom he was saving. Hamilton, his buddy! McCall quickly tied
his emergency bandage around the wound in Hamilton’s chest, slid the
prostrate form over his shoulder and started back. A trickle of blood
which blinded his right eye told him that he had been wounded. But it
was no time to quit and painfully, his wound throbbing with every step,
he managed to stagger into a shell hole. Then everything turned black.
In the meantime Williams, in command of a detachment of pioneer troops
assigned to McCall’s company, had been watching breathlessly from a
fire step in the front-line trench. Now, when he saw McCall stagger
into the shell hole, he was over the parapet in a flash and wriggling
across the muddy, shell-torn ground like a snake. Half way across, a
spent fragment of shell struck his head and dazed him. But he kept
on, as in a trance, and reached the two white officers before his head
cleared. McCall was recovering consciousness and Williams bound his
wound. To his own wound he paid no attention. Then the two began their
return to the American line, dragging and pushing the body of Hamilton
between them.
Within the trenches all was excitement, and it was all that the
lieutenant in charge of the company could do to keep every man in the
front-line trench from swarming over the top.
“They’ll bring him back!” he shouted. “There’s no use any one else
risking his life. Get down from the fire step and stay down if you
value your lives!”
The lieutenant swore and prayed in turn. The men recklessly stuck their
heads above the parapet and shouted words of encouragement, although
they knew that their voices were no match for the thunder of the
artillery.
“Come on now! Stick it out! Just a little longer! Come on!” Their
voices pleaded.
Inch by inch, foot by foot, they were creeping. They had come within a
few yards of the trench and the men were shouting themselves hoarse.
“Come on! You’re almost there! Stick it out!”
Suddenly there was a terrific explosion that sent showers of rock and
mud into the trench and both Williams and McCall rolled over, the blood
gushing from many wounds. Hamilton, between them, had been completely
protected. This time there was no holding them. A half dozen whites and
blacks were over the parapet and back again, bearing the three wounded
officers.
“You’ll get court-martialed sure as hell for this!” yelled the
lieutenant. Tears were in his eyes--“Or you’ll all get cited for
bravery.”
He was right. The next morning they heard from the old man (the
colonel). Every one of them, including McCall and Williams, had been
cited for conspicuous bravery on the field of battle, over and above
their line of duty, in rescuing the wounded.
V
Hamilton was sitting up in a wheelchair, watching Miss Meadows flutter
about from one patient to another--raising or lowering a bed, adjusting
a pillow, injecting morphine, sponging a patient’s back, bringing
water--doing a hundred and one things. Hamilton admired her swift
skill--the sureness with which she did everything, the expertness with
which her capable fingers patted the bedclothes into position, the
gentle strength of her finely molded arm when she lifted a man in bed
or helped him to his chair, the dexterity with which she snipped off
gauze and linen and converted them into dressing pads and bandages.
Above all, her cheerfulness.
At six each morning she would come into the ward--in her familiar white
sweater coat on the cooler days--and take temperatures. She carried
scores of thermometers in a glass, it seemed, and as she moved from bed
to bed she would shake them down with a dexterous twist of her wrist.
Sometimes, on especially cold days, when her fingers were numb, a
thermometer would slip from her grasp and shatter on the floor. But in
spite of cold, and no matter how little she had slept the night before,
she invariably smiled.
Meadows had a word and a nickname for everyone. Hamilton was a
“Colonel,” because of his first outburst against having a negro in his
ward, his Southern accent and his rather aristocratic cast of features.
“In a few more days, you’ll have a regular goatee, and then you _will_
look like a colonel,” she used to tease him when he was still lying on
his back, unable to shave.
The patients were all her boys and she mothered them in a delightfully
impartial manner.
One of the men she maternally called “Sleepyhead,” because he was
always asleep when time came for taking temperatures. Another was
“Caruso,” because he snored (she called it singing) in his sleep.
“That was a most beautiful aria you rendered last night,” teased
Meadows, “it sounded like the Awakening of the Lion from Hagenbeck.”
Then, as every one in the ward laughed, and before Caruso could reply,
she thrust a thermometer between his lips. Caruso pretended to be in a
great rage and in pantomime drew a knife and threatened her with it.
“How’s the Great Lover?” she asked another, who had come out of the
ether revealing certain startling chapters of his amatory experiences.
“The Hearst papers have got a reporter planted under your bed, so you
had better be careful of what you say in your sleep. They’re running
the first chapter of your memoirs, An Ethereal Affinity, tonight.”
“You know I have only one love,” mocked back the Great Lover,
stretching out his arms.
“I wonder who that can be,” said Meadows and popped a thermometer into
his mouth.
“Great Scott, nurse, I’m burning up!” cried a patient. Meadows snatched
the thermometer from his hand to find the mercury near the top of the
column. It was an old trick, however. The patient had held the end of a
cigarette to the bulb.
“My, oh my!” Meadows shook her head, so that the brown curls straggled
out from beneath her cap. “We’ll have to cut out the nicotine. No more
cigarettes from now on, and you’ll see how soon your temperature goes
back to normal!”
“Not one cigarette, nursey?” pleaded the practical joker.
“Not a chocolate cigarette--unless you share it with me!”
For each there was some bit of badinage that made the dreary days of
convalescence pass all the more quickly. Even with the more serious
cases, the officers whose jaws had been replaced with pieces of metal
strung together by wire, the officers who had been blinded, the
amputations--Meadows joked.
Hamilton was making comparisons. He wondered whether the girl to whom
he had become engaged just before he left for France could have stood
the gaff as well. Physically they were remarkably alike. They could
easily pass for cousins, even sisters. They were both little women and
both had a girlish animation. Both were dark, with wavy brown hair and
large brown eyes. Eyes of a wild doe, Hamilton used to say of Margaret.
Meadows might have been an inch taller and correspondingly heavier. But
the same domed forehead, refined nose, bowed lips.
Hamilton wondered whether Margaret, so graceful on the dance floor, so
competent in the drawing room, or at the dinner table, would be equally
at home in a hospital ward. Could she have rubbed a man’s back with
alcohol, or placed a drain in a gaping wound as successfully as she
poured tea--do all these things with a smile? He wondered.
Meadows was approaching Hamilton’s wheelchair with a cup of steaming
chocolate, and for a moment Hamilton had an acute longing to be back in
the States, nearer Margaret.
“What’s the matter, Colonel, hasn’t she written?” the nurse smiled
down upon him. “I’m quite sure I saw a letter for you in the office.
Orderly’ll be up in a few minutes. Drink this chocolate. I made it
myself.”
Hamilton took the cup and admitted that he was woefully homesick.
“Some day,” he gulped and blinked hard. “Jimminy, this stuff is
hot!--some day I’d like to have you meet some one in Georgia--Corinth.
A girl I know--my--some one I know real well. She looks a great deal
like you, too. Same complexion and same way of smiling. Might be
sisters.”
“No,” laughed Miss Meadows, shaking her head, “I haven’t a relative
south of South Bend, Indiana. It’s just a stage of convalescence. When
they reach it, all my boys,” she gave an expressive wave of her white
arm, “tell me I remind them of some one. So you’d better look out or
you’ll be mistaking me for her and telling me things meant only for her
shell-like ears. Oh, such things have happened before!”
Meadows shook her forefinger saucily at the colonel and whisked away.
Hamilton swallowed a burning gulp of chocolate and felt more homesick
than ever.
Meadows was right. There _was_ a letter for Hamilton--a letter which
sent his heart thumping. It came in a square envelope, lined with
colored tissue, addressed in large, round characters, in green ink and
smelling faintly of musk. A dozen postmarks and forwarding addresses
showed the course it had travelled. Hamilton had written Margaret
that he would spend his leave in Paris, the last week in September,
and she had addressed the letter in care of the American Club. When
Hamilton failed to claim the missive, it had evidently been sent to
headquarters. From there it had been forwarded to his regiment. The
letter had followed the regiment from post to post, had finally caught
up with it and been sent on to the field hospital. From there it had
been sent to the American hospital on Rue de St. Jacques, Paris.
Evidently Margaret was unaware that Hamilton had been wounded and had
lain hovering between life and death for two months. Hamilton tore open
the letter.
“Dearest Bobby boy,” it ran. “I know that some horrid censor will be
snooping through this, so I can’t tell you how much I love you!
“I suppose you are in Paris now, enjoying your leave. Oh, how jealous
I am of those _notorious_ French beauties! I hear that they bob their
hair, wear skirts up to their knees and smoke cigarettes. How shocking!
But you’ll always be true to your little Margaret, won’t you?
“You don’t know how much we at home suffer! I don’t mean by going
without wheat or meat or heat on certain days or without lights
at night; nor even our untiring work on drives and committees and
meetings. I mean the gap you have made in our lives _that nothing can
fill_!
“Every one of us at home would give _anything_ he could to join you on
the firing line. I know I would, if I were a man. In the meantime I
am ‘doing my bit’ by knitting Red Cross sweaters and preparing gauze.
I am attending a class in hospitalization, so that I can help out in
our local hospitals in case all the trained nurses are accepted for
overseas duty.
“Papa is very proud of you. When he learned that you had been
recommended for a captaincy, he said that he just _knew_ that you had
it in you, because you came from one of the best Southern families.
Father has so much responsibility now, keeping the niggers at work.
He says that his overseers are working day and night to keep up the
production of cotton. Cotton is used in the soldiers’ uniforms and in
making gun-cotton, so father really feels as though he’s doing his bit
in fighting the Hun.
“Cousin George says he wishes he were in your shoes, but the local
draft board has ruled that his services in editing a newspaper are
indispensable, and of more value to the country than shouldering a
rifle.
“Howard Pinkney--the man you were so jealous of--foolish boy!--still
comes around and proposes regularly. But there’s no chance, is there,
against my soldier boy? I hate these war profiteers, but papa says
Howard is becoming a splendid business man and doing a real service
to the nation by supplying the arsenals with walnut for rifle stocks.
It seems that walnut is the best wood for that purpose, and at the
beginning of the war Howard very thoughtfully managed to collect most
of it in the South. He said that he would have liked to follow your
example, but I suppose he is doing more by ‘carrying on’ right at home,
seeing that the boys over there are supplied with rifle stocks.
“You see, _everybody’s_ ‘doing his bit,’ one way or another. I think it
is _splendid_! It’s the only way that our Anglo-Saxon supremacy can be
maintained. Even at our dances and receptions the note is patriotic. We
invite all the officers from the camps near-by and do our best to make
them feel as if they had not been forgotten. We always end up with the
_Star-Spangled Banner_ and everyone stands up so straight and sings
_right from the heart_!
“A few foreigners and radicals have given us some trouble by not
subscribing their full quota of Liberty Bonds, and the committee of
twenty-one has daubed their houses yellow. Some have even asked for
higher wages, because the war has made prices go up so high. But they
don’t realize their sacred duty to their country. There is talk about
the negroes revolting. Some agitators have been at work amongst them.
They’re demanding accountings and cash, or rather hinting at it. They
wouldn’t dare demand it. It sounds like Bolshevism to dad! A Socialist
came here to speak--but the committee rode him out of town on a rail
before he could get a meeting and spread disregard for Americanism and
the Constitution.
“Dad and George and Howard say that the old Ku Klux Klan ought to be
revived to teach the negroes their place and keep the agitators and
other carpetbaggers from invading the South.
“But I _mustn’t_ bore you any more with this. I simply wanted to let
you know how the war was affecting the South. Perhaps by this time the
war will be over. I just know when the Americans get upon the field
of battle they will show the rest of the Allies a thing or two about
fighting.”
Hamilton turned from his reading and looked out of the window. The
trees had turned gaunt and bare, heralds of the approaching winter.
People were hurrying to and fro. Carriages carrying notables were
dashing down the boulevards. Officers in brilliant uniforms were moving
about the streets. Paris, following its first intoxication of victory,
was going about the complicated business of determining the conditions
of peace. Wilson’s fourteen points were being adroitly broken. New
conceptions of international relations, the League of Nations, the
autonomy of Montenegro--bizarre and pathetic national points of
view--were being molded to suit the nations of the world. Pompous
international tailors were cutting up the economic fabric of Europe,
woven in the loom of the centuries, and trying to form coats to clothe
a confusion of political and sentimental ideas of nationalism. Experts
were laying out the patterns. No two agreed exactly.
Hamilton resumed his perusal of the activities of Corinth during the
last phase of the war, the town gossip, the state of health of numerous
individuals. He crushed the letter and leaned back against his pillow.
Thoughtless, chattering, charming Margaret! If he could only crush
her alluring girlishness to him, and be aware of her pretty babbling,
without listening to it; simply nodding from time to time and putting
in a few words!
His chest was hurting him a little. He was growing weak. It was the
first time he had sat up for more than half an hour. Meadows noticed
him sink back in his chair, quickly summoned two orderlies and had
him lifted back in bed, her capable hands patting the pillow into a
comfortable shape, and tucking in the blankets in a twinkling.
“Don’t swallow this, like Little Nemo over there,” she said. “He eats
everything I give him--soup, thermometers, roast turkey, shaving
soap--everything--a regular ostrich. Now let’s take your hand.
Something exciting in that letter? What’s the matter with your pulse,
colonel? Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to her in ten days, good as
new--if I have to write my own prescriptions. Oh, it’s not so high for
a man in love. Temperature normal.”
Meadows made a notation on his chart at the foot of the bed and then
passed on to the next bed, and Hamilton had a sudden desire to seize
her white hand and hold it.