A few days later it was definitely arranged that Nona Davis, Barbara
Meade, Lady Dorothy Mathers and Daisy Redmond should be enrolled in the
Red Cross ambulance work.
To understand the service of the Red Cross ambulances one must be
familiar with the unusual conditions which existed in this most
terrible war of all human history.
Most of us know, of course, that the greater part of the fighting
was done at night. By day scouts in aeroplanes endeavored to locate
the enemy’s positions, while sentries kept guard along the miles of
trenches to fire at any man who dared venture within what was called
the zone of death. So all the work of war except the actual fighting
must take place behind each army’s line of entrenchments.
This means that in the early morning, when the night’s cruelties were
past, the wounded soldiers were carried from the field of battle or
from the trenches to some place of safety in the rear. Here nurses
and doctors could give them first aid. And this required tremendous
personal bravery. The stricken soldiers must be borne in the arms of
their companions to the nearest Red Cross, or else lifted into the
ambulances or smaller motor cars. These traveled with all possible
speed across the tragic fields of the dead, as soon as a lull in the
firing made attempt at rescue possible.
There, behind a barricade of trees, or of sand bags, or of a stone
wall, or whatever defense human ingenuity could invent, stood white
tents, or else a stable or house. These waved flags of white bearing a
crimson cross, demanding safety for the suffering.
These temporary hospitals had to be established at any place where the
need was greatest. But the soldiers could not remain in these quarters.
As soon as possible they were taken to the nearest properly equipped
hospital, sometimes fairly near the fighting line. At other times they
were loaded into trains and borne many weary miles away.
But in nearly every case they were carried to the cars or to the nearer
hospitals in the Red Cross ambulances. They were the only chariots of
peace the war had so far acquired.
However, it is good to know that together with all the modern
inventions for the destruction of men, science had done all that was
possible to make the new Red Cross ambulances havens of comfort and of
cure. In Paris, the great Madame Curie, the discoverer of radium, had
been giving her time and talent to the equipment of ambulances for the
soldiers. From this country much of the money that had been poured so
generously into Europe had been devoted to their purchase.
So the four Red Cross girls from the Hospital of the Sacred Heart (so
named in honor of the old convent school) were naturally impressed with
the importance of their new duties.
The plan was that they were to travel back and forth from the field
hospitals with the wounded soldiers who required the most immediate
attention. A doctor would be in charge of each ambulance and of
necessity the chauffeur. Under the circumstances it was thought better
to have two nurses instead of one. The four additional nurses were
required because two new ambulances had just been added to the British
service, as a gift from New York City, through the efforts of Mrs.
Henry Payne, who was especially interested in the Sacred Heart Hospital.
The morning that the girls left for the nearer neighborhood of the
battlefield was an exquisite June day. The sun is one of France’s many
lovers, turning her into “La Belle Dame,” the name by which she is
known to her own children and to some of her admirers from other lands.
All the nurses who were off duty at the hospital poured out into the
garden to say farewell and God-speed to their companions.
Except for the prejudice which Lady Dorothy Mathers and her friends
continued to feel against the four Americans, everybody else had
been most kind. The English manner is colder than the American or the
French, but once having learned to understand and like you, they are
the most loyal people in the world.
Three of the American Red Cross girls were beginning to realize this.
But Barbara Meade still felt herself misunderstood and disliked. Under
normal conditions Barbara was not the type of girl given to posing as
“misunderstood” and being sorry for herself in consequence.
The difficulty was that ever since her arrival the horror of the war
and the suffering about her had made her unlike herself. She felt
terribly western, terribly “gauche,” which is the French word meaning
left-handed and all that it implies. Then Barbara had a fashion of
saying exactly what she thought without reflecting on the time or
place. This had gotten her into trouble not once but a dozen times.
She did not mean to criticize, only she had the unfortunate habit of
thinking out loud. But most of all, Barbara lamented her own failure
as a nurse and all that it must argue to her companions. For so far
they had the right to consider her a shirker and a coward, or at least
as one of the tiresome, foolish women who rush off to care for the
wounded in a war because of an emotion and without the sense or the
training to be anything but hopelessly in the way.
It was for this reason that Barbara had finally decided to accept the
new opportunity offered her. If she should make a failure of it, she
agreed with Eugenia’s frank statement of her case: she must simply go
back home so as not to be a nuisance.
Curious, but one of the reasons why Barbara loathed the thought of her
own surrender was the idea that if she turned back, she would have to
face Dick Thornton in New York City. This thought had been in her mind
all along. For one thing she kept recalling how bravely she had talked
to Dick of her own intentions, and of how she had reproached him for
his idle existence.
The worst of Barbara’s conviction was that should she return a
failure, no one would be kinder or more thoughtful of her feelings than
Dick. Of course, she had not known him very long, but it had been long
enough for her to appreciate that Dick Thornton was utterly without
the ugly spirit of “I told you so.” But perhaps his sympathy and quiet
acceptance of her weakness would be harder to endure than blame.
So it was a very pale and silent Barbara who walked out of the old
stone convent that morning with her arm linked inside Eugenia’s. She
was beginning to appreciate Eugenia more and to realize that her first
impression of Miss Barbara Meade’s abilities, or lack of them, was not
so ridiculously unfair as she had thought.
Certainly no one could be kinder than Eugenia had been in the few days
between Barbara’s acceptance of her new work and the time for actually
beginning it.
She kept looking at her now, feeling almost as one would at the sight
of a frightened child. Poor Barbara was pretending to be so brave.
Though she had not spoken again of her own qualms, it was plain enough
to the older girl that Barbara was almost ill with apprehension. Not
that Eugenia believed she was afraid of the actual dangers that might
befall her from going so much closer to the battle front. She suffered
from the nervous dread of breaking down at the sight of the wounded and
so again failing to make good.
The superintendent of the nurses, a splendid middle-aged woman from one
of the big London hospitals, was also aware of Barbara Meade’s state of
mind. For several days with all the other work she had to do she had
been quietly watching her. Here at the last moment she had an impulse
to tell Barbara to give up. After all, she was such a child and the
strain might be too much for her. Then she concluded it would be best
to let the girl find out for herself.
The contrast was odd between the two American girls who were answering
this new call of war. Nona Davis did not seem nervous or alarmed. Not
that she was unconscious either of the dangers or the difficulties. She
seemed uplifted by some spiritual emotion. She was like a young Joan
of Arc, only she went forth to carry not a sword but a nurse’s “Red
Badge of Courage.”
A little after daylight the four girls and two of the hospital surgeons
left for the front. The two new ambulances had been taken directly to
the field hospital where they were to meet them.
The night before news had come that there had been fresh fighting and
help was needed at once. So one of the hospital automobiles had been
requisitioned to transport the little party.
“We will be back by tonight with the wounded,” Nona Davis said calmly
as she kissed Mildred Thornton good-by. “You are not to worry about us.
I don’t think we are going into any danger.”
Barbara made no attempt at farewells; she simply sat quietly on the
back seat of the car with her hand clasped inside Nona’s, and her eyes
full of tears. Had she tried to talk she might have broken down and
she was painfully conscious that the two English girls, Lady Dorothy
Mathers and Daisy Redmond, were staring at her in amazement. It was
hard to appreciate why if she was afraid of the war nursing, she would
not give it up.
The first part of the drive was through country like that surrounding
the Sacred Heart Hospital. General Sir John French had given orders
that in every place where it was possible the agriculture of France
should be respected. The crops must not be trampled down and destroyed,
for the rich and poor of France alike must live and also feed their
army.
So all along the first part of their route the girls could see women
and children at work. They wore the long, dark-blue blouses of the
French working classes, at once so much cleaner and more picturesque
than the old, half-worn cloth clothes of our own working people.
It was all so serene and sweet that for a little while Nona and Barbara
almost forgot their errand.
Then the face of the countryside changed. There were no peasants’ huts
that were not half in ruins, great houses occupied but a few months
before by the wealthy landowners of northern France were now as fallen
into disuse as if they had been ancient fortresses. Here and there,
where the artillery had swept them, forests of trees had fallen like
dead soldiers, and over certain of the fields there was a blight as if
they had been devastated with fire.
Then the car brought the little party to the spot where in the morning
sunshine they caught the gleam of the Red Cross flag.
The place was a deserted stable sheltered by a rise of ground. To the
front lay the British trenches, covered with thatch and the boughs
of many trees; to the right and some distance off, hidden behind
breastworks, were enormous long distance guns.
Also one of the surgeons explained to Lady Dorothy and Nona, who seemed
most interested, that on the hill beyond the hospital where nothing
could be seen for the denseness of the shrubbery, several of the
officers had their headquarters and from there dictated the operations
in the trenches and in the fields.
The night before must have been a busy one, for as the car stopped
behind the improvised hospital, soldiers in khaki could be seen
staggering back and forth with the wounded, surgeons with their work
showing all too realistically upon them. Then there were the sounds as
well as the sights of suffering.
As Barbara Meade crawled out of the automobile she felt her knees give
way under her and a darkness swallow her up. Then she realized that she
must be fainting again.