Young Hilda At The Wars Part 1

Young Hilda at the Wars.

by Arthur Gleason.

_EXPERIENCE_

(_By way of Preface_)

Of these sketches that tell of ruined Belgium, I must say that I saw what I have told of. They are not meditations in a library. Because of the great courtesy of the Prime Minister of Belgium, who is the war minister, and through the daily companions.h.i.+p of his son, our little group of helpers were permitted to go where no one else could go, to pa.s.s in under sh.e.l.l fire, to see action, to lift the wounded out of the muddy siding where they had fallen. Ten weeks of Red Cross work showed me those faces and torn bodies which I have described. The only details that have been altered for the purpose of story-telling are these: The Doctor who rescued the thirty aged at Dixmude is still alive; Smith did not receive the decoration, but Hilda did; it was a candlestick on the piano of Pervyse that vibrated to sh.e.l.l fire; the spy continues to signal without being caught; "Pervyse," the war-baby, was not adopted by an American financier; motor ambulances were given to the Corps, not to an individual. With these exceptions, the incidents are lifted over from the experience of two English women and my wife in Pervyse, and my own weeks as stretcher-bearer on an ambulance.

In that deadlock of slaughter where I worked, I saw no pageantry of war, no glitter and pomp, at all. Nothing remains to me of war pictures except the bleakness. When I think suddenly of Belgium, I see a town heavy with the coming horror:--almost all the houses sealed, the curtains drawn, the friendly door barred. And then I see a town after the invaders have sh.e.l.led it and burned it, with the homeless dogs howling in the streets, and the pigeons circling in search of their cote, but not finding it. Or I look down a long, lonely road, gutted with sh.e.l.l holes, with dead cattle in the fields, and farm-houses in a heap of broken bricks and dust.

And when I do not see a landscape, dreary with its creeping ruin, I see men in pain. Sometimes I see the faces of dead boys--one boy outstretched at length on a doorstep with the smoke of his burning body rising through the mesh of his blue army clothing; and then a half mile beyond, in the yard of a farm-house, a young peasant spread out as he had fallen when the chance bullet found him.

That alone which seemed good in the horror was the courage of the modern man. He dies as simply and as bravely as the young of Thermopylae. These men of the factory and office are crowding more meaning into their brief weeks by the Yser and under the shattering of Ypres than is contained in all the last half century of clerk routine.

I

YOUNG HILDA AT THE WARS

She was an American girl from that very energetic and prosperous state of Iowa, which if not as yet the mother of presidents, is at least the parent of many exuberant and useful persons. Will power is grown out yonder as one of the crops. She had a will of her own and her eye showed a blue cerulean. Her hair was a bright yellow, lighting up a gloomy room. It had three shades in it, and you never knew ahead of time which shade was going to enrich the day, so that an encounter with her always carried a surprise. For when she arranged that abundance in soft nun-like drooping folds along the side of the head, the quieter tones were in command. And when it was piled coil on coil on the crown, it added inches to the prairie stature, and it was mellow like ripe corn in the sun. But the prettiest of all was at the seash.o.r.e or on the hills, when she unbuckled it from its moorings and let it fall in its plenty to the waist. Then its changing lights came out in a rippling play of color, and the winds had their way with it. It was then youth's battleflag unfurled, and strong men were ready to follow. It was such a vivid possession that strangers were always suspicious of it, till they knew the girl, or saw it in its unshackled freedom. She had that wayward quality of charm, which visits at random a frail creature like Maude Adams, and a burly personality, such as that of Mr. Roosevelt. It is a pleasant endowment, for it leaves nothing for the possessor to do in life except to bring it along, in order to obtain what he is asking for.

When it is harnessed to will power, the pair of them enjoy a career.

So when Hilda arrived in large London in September of the great war, there was nothing for it but that somehow she must go to war. She did not wish to shoot anybody, neither a German grocer nor a Flemish peasant, for she liked people. She had always found them willing to make a place for her in whatever was going her way. But she did want to see what war was like. Her experience had always been of the gentler order.

Canoeing and country walks, and a flexible wrist in playing had given her only a meagre training for the stresses of the modern battlefield.

Once she had fainted when a favorite aunt had fallen from a trolley car.

And she had left the room when a valued friend had attacked a stiff loaf of bread with a crust that turned the edge of the knife into his hand.

She had not then made her peace with bloodshed and suffering.

On the Strand, London, there was a group of alert professional women, housed in a theatre building, and known as the Women's Crisis League.

To their office she took her way, determined to enlist for Belgium. Mrs.

Bracher was in charge of the office--a woman with a stern chin, and an explosive energy, that welcomed initiative in newcomers.

"It's a poor time to get pupils," said the fair-haired Hilda, "I don't want to go back to the Studio Club in New York, as long as there's more doing over here. I'm out of funds, but I want to work."

"Are you a trained nurse?" asked Mrs. Bracher, who was that, as well as a motor cyclist and a woman of property, a certificated midwife, and a veterinarian.

"Not even a little bit," replied Hilda, "but I'm ready to do dirty work.

There must be lots to do for an untrained person, who is strong and used to roughing it. I'll catch hold all right, if you'll give me the chance."

"Right, oh," answered Mrs. Bracher. "Dr. Neil McDonnell is shortly leaving for Belgium with a motor-ambulance Corps," she said, "but he has hundreds of applications, and his list is probably completed."

"Thank you," said Hilda, "that will do nicely."

"I don't mind telling you," continued Mrs. Bracher, "that I shall probably go with him to the front. I hope he will accept you, but there are many ahead of you in applying, and he has already promised more than he can take."

Hilda took a taxi from St. Mary Le Strand to Harley Street. Dr. Neil McDonnell was a dapper mystical little specialist, who was renowned for his applications of psychotherapy to raging militants and weary society leaders. He was a Scottish Highlander, with a rare gift of intuitive insight. He, too, had the agreeable quality of personal charm. Like all to whom the G.o.ds have been good, he looked with a favoring eye on the spectacle of youth.

"You come from a country which will one day produce the choicest race in history," he began, "you have a blend of nationalities. We have a little corner in Scotland where several strains were merged, and the men were finer and the women fairer than the average. But as for going to Belgium, I must tell you that we have many more desiring to go than we can possibly find room for."

"That is why I came to you," responded Hilda. "That means compet.i.tion, and then you will have to choose the youngest and strongest."

"I can promise you nothing," went on the Doctor; "I am afraid it is quite impossible. But if you care to do it, keep in touch with me for the next fortnight. Send me an occasional letter. Call me up, if you will."

She did. She sent him telegrams, letters by the "Boots" in her lodging-house. She called upon him. She took Mrs. Bracher with her.

And that was how Hilda came to go to Flanders. When the Corps crossed from happy unawakened London to forlorn Belgium, they felt lost. How to take hold, they did not know. There were the cars, and here were the workers, but just what do you do?

Their first weeks were at Ghent, rather wild, disheveled weeks of clutching at work. They had one objective: the battlefield; one purpose: to make a series of rescues under fire. Cramped in a placid land, smothered by peace-loving folk, they had been set quivering by the war.

The time had come to throw themselves at the Continent, and do or die where action was thick. Nothing was quainter, even in a land of astounding spectacles, than the sight of the rescuing ambulances rolling out to the wounded of a morning, loaded to the gunwale with charming women and several men. "Where will they put the wounded?" was the query that sprang to every lip that gaped at their pa.s.sing. There was room for everybody but wounded. Fortunately there were few wounded in those early days when rescuers tingled for the chance to serve and see. So the Ghent experience was a probation rather than a fulfilled success. Then the enemy descended from fallen Antwerp, and the Corps sped away, ahead of the vast gray Prussian machine, through Bruges and Ostend, to Furnes.

Here, too, in Furnes, the Corps was still trying to find its place in the immense and intricate scheme of war.

The man that saved them from their fogged incert.i.tude was a Belgian doctor, a military Red Cross worker. The first flash of him was of a small silent man, not significant. But when you had been with him, you felt reserves of force. That small person had a will of his own. He was thirty-one years of age, with a thoughtful but kindly face. His eye had pleasant lights in it, and a twinkle of humor. His voice was low and even-toned. He lifted the wounded in from the trenches, dressed their wounds, and sent them back to the base hospitals. He was regimental dentist as well as Doctor, and accompanied his men from point to point, along the battlefront from the sea to the frontier. Van der Helde was his name. He called on the Corps soon after their arrival in Furnes, one of the last bits of Belgian soil unoccupied by the invaders.

"You are wandering about like lost souls," he said to them; "let me tell you how to get to work."

He did so. As the results of his suggestions, the six motor ambulances and four touring cars ran out each morning to the long thin line of troops that lay burrowed in the wet earth, all the way from the Baths of Nieuport-on-the-Sea down through the sh.e.l.led villages of the Ramskappele-Dixmude frontier to the beautiful ancient city of Ypres.

The cars returned with their patient freight of wounded through the afternoon and evening.

What had begun as an adventure deepened to a grim fight against blood-poisoning and long-continuing exposure and hunger. Hilda learned to drop the antiseptic into open wounds, to apply the pad, and roll the cotton. She learned to cut away the heavy army blue cloth to reach the spurting artery. She built the fire that heated the soup. She distributed the clean warm socks. Doubtless someone else could have done the work more skilfully, but the someone else was across the water in a comfortable country house, or watching the Russian dancers at the Coliseum.

The leader of the Corps, Dr. McDonnell, was an absurdly brave little man. His heart may not have been in the Highlands, but his mind certainly was, for he led his staff into sh.e.l.l fire, week-days and Sundays, and all with a fine unconsciousness that anything unusual was singing and breaking around the path of their performance. He carried a pocket edition of the Oxford Book of Verse, and in the lulls of slaughter turned to the Wordsworth sonnets with a fine relish.

"Something is going to happen. I can feel it coming," said Mrs. Bracher after one of these excursions into the troubled regions.

"Yes," agreed Hilda, "they are long chances we are taking, but we are fools for luck."

A famous war correspondent paid them a fleeting visit, before he was ordered twenty miles back to Dunkirk by Kitchener.

"By the law of probabilities," he observed to Dr. McDonnell, as he was saying good-bye, "you and your staff are going to be wiped out, if you keep on running your motors into excitement."

The Doctor smiled. It was doubtful if he heard the man.

One day, the Doctor got hold of Smith, a London boy driver, and Hilda, and said:

"I think we would better visit Dixmude, this morning. It sounds like guns in that direction. That means work for us. Get your hat, my dear."

"But I never wear a hat," she said with a touch of irritation.

"Ah, I hadn't noticed," returned the Doctor, and he hadn't. Hilda went free and fair those days, with uncovered head. Where the men went, there went she. For the modern woman has put aside fear along with the other impediments. The Doctor and Hilda, and, lastly, Smith, climbed aboard and started at fair speed.

Smith's motor-ambulance was a swift machine, canopied by a brown hood, the color of a Mediterranean sail, with red crosses on the sides to ward off sh.e.l.ls, and a huge red cross on the top to claim immunity from aeroplanes with bombs and plumbed arrows.