Young Hilda At The Wars Part 10

They followed her at a distance. She went swiftly up the road, and straight to the railway tracks. She entered the house, the dark, wrecked house, where from the second story window, a perpetual look-out was kept, like the watch of the Vestal Virgins. They came to the open door, and heard her ascend to the room of the vigil.

"You must come," they heard her say, "come at once."

"No, no," answered the voice of the Commandant, "I am on duty here. But you--what brings you here? You cannot stay. Go at once. I order you."

"I shall not go till you go," the girl replied in expressionless tones.

"I tell you to go," repeated the Commandant in angry but suppressed voice.

"You can shoot me," said the girl, "but I will not go without you.

Come--" her voice turned to pleading--"Come, while there is time."

"My time has come," said the Commandant. "It is here--my end."

"Then for me, too," she said, "but I have come to take you from it."

There was a silence of a few seconds, then the sound of a chair sc.r.a.ping the floor, heavy boots on the boarding, and the two, Commandant and girl, descending the stairs. Unastonished, they stepped out and found the two women waiting.

"We must save the girl," said the Commandant. "Come, run for it, all of you, run!"

He pushed them forward with his hands, and back down the road they had come. He ran and they ran till they reached their dwelling, and entered, and stood at the north window, looking over toward the dim house from which they had escaped. Out from the still night of darkness, came a low thunder from beyond the Yser. In the tick of a pulse-beat, the moaning of a sh.e.l.l throbbed on the air and, with instant vibrancy, the singing string of the piano at their back answered the flight of the sh.e.l.l. And in the same breath, they heard a roar at the railroad, and the crash of timbers. Soft licking flames broke out in the house of the Belgian watchers. Slowly but powerfully, the flames gathered volume, and swept up their separate tongues into one bright blaze, till the house was a bonfire against the heavy sky.

LOST

There were cities in Belgium of medieval loveliness, where the evening light lay in deep purple on ca.n.a.ls seeping at foundations of castle and church, with the sacred towers tall in the sky, and a moon just over them, and a star or two beside.

That beauty has been torn out of a man's consciousness and spoiled to his love for ever, by moving up a howitzer and priming it with destruction. First, the rumble of the gun from far away, then the whistle of flying metal, sharpening its anger as it nears, then the thud and roar of explosion as it clutches and dissolves its mark. Now its seven-mile journey is ended. It has found its home and its home is a ruin. Over the peaceful earth and under a silent sky, bits of destruction are travelling, projections of the human will. Where lately there was a soft outline, rising from the soil as if the stones of the field had been called together by the same breath that spread the forest, now there is a heap of rock-dust. Man, infinite in faculty, has narrowed his devising to the uses of havoc. He has lifted his hand against the immortal part of himself. He has said--"The works I have wrought I will turn back to the dust out of which they came."

All the good labor of minds and hands which we cannot bring back is undone in an instant of time by a few pounds of chemical. That can be burned and broken in the pa.s.sage of one cloud over the moon which not all the years of a century will restore. Seasons return, but not to us returns the light in the windows of Rheims.

V

WAR

There fell a day when the call came from Ypres to aid the English. A bitter hot engagement had been fought for seven days, with a hundred and twenty thousand men in action, and the woods and fields on the Hoogar road were strewn with the wounded. Dr. McDonnell, the head of the Ambulance Corps, rode over from Furnes to the sh.e.l.l-blackened house of the nurses in Pervyse. With him he brought Woffington, a young Englishman, to drive the ambulance. He asked Hilda to go with them to Ypres.

"Scotch, English and American, all on one seat," said Hilda with a smile.

They covered the thirty miles in one hour, and went racing through the city of Ypres, eastward toward the action. Half way out to the noise of artillery, their car was stopped by an English officer, handsome, courteous, but very firm.

"You cannot go out on this road," he said.

"We will be back before you know it," pleaded Hilda. "We will bring back your wounded. Let me show you."

"Report to me on your way back," he ordered. "My name is Fitzgerald, Captain Fitzgerald."

They rode on. All down the road, straggled wounded men, three miles of them limped, they held up a red hand, they carried a shattered arm in a sling. There was blood on their faces. They walked with bowed head, tired.

"These are the lucky ones," said Woffington, "they only got scotched."

That was the famous battle of Ypres. Of the dead there were more than the mothers of a countryside could replace in two generations. But death is war's best gift. War's other gifts are malicious--fever and plague, and the maiming of strength, and the fouling of beauty--shapely bodies tortured to strange forms, eager young faces torn away. Death is choicer than that, a release from the horror of life trampled like a filthy weed.

"Mons was a birthday party to this," said a Tommy to Hilda. "They're expecting too much of us. The whole thing is put on us to do, and it takes a lot of doing."

Dr. McDonnell and Woffington loaded the car with the severest of the cases, and returned to the white house of the Officer. He was waiting for them, grim, attentive.

Hilda flung up the hood:--two Tommies at length on the stretchers on one side of the car; opposite them, seven Tommies in a row with hand, arm, foot, leg, shoulder, neck and breast wounds. It was too good a piece of rescue work to be strangled with Red Tape. The Officer could not refrain from a smile of approval.

"You may work along this road," he said, "but look out for the other officers. They will probably stop you. But, remember, my permission holds good only for to-day. Then you must go back. This isn't according to regulations. Now, go on to the hospital."

Ten minutes more, and they swung inside the great iron gates of the Sisters of Mercy. Never had Hilda felt the war so keenly as now. She had been dealing with it bit by bit. But here it was spread out beyond all dealing with. She had to face it without solutions.

There, in the Convent, known now as Military Hospital Number One, was row after row of Khaki men in bed. They had overflowed to the stone floor down the long corridors, hundreds of yards of length, and every foot close packed, like fish in a tin, with helpless outstretched men.

The grey stones and the drab suits on the bundles of straw,--what a backwash from the tides of slaughter. If a man stood on his feet, he had to reach for a cane. There were no whole men there, except the busy stretcher-bearers bringing in new tenants for the crowded smelly place.

As quickly as they could unload their men, and stuff them into the corridor, Hilda and the doctor and Woffington sped back down the line, and up to the thronged dressing-stations. Wounded men were not their only charge, nor their gravest. They took in a soldier sobbing from the shock of the ceaseless sh.e.l.l fire. The moaning and wasp-like buzz of the flying metal, then the earth-shaking thud of its impact, and the roar of its high explosive, had played upon nerves not elastic enough to absorb the strain, till the man became a whimpering child. And they carried in a man shaking from ague, a big, fine fellow, trembling in every part, who could not lift a limb to walk. That which had been rugged enough for a lifetime of work became palsied after a few weeks of this king's sport. This undramatic slaughter was slower than the work of the guns, but it was as thorough. A man with colic was put into the car.

"I'm bad," he said. The pain kept griping him, so that he rode leaning down with his face pointed at the footboard.

Working as Hilda worked, with her two efficient friends and a well-equipped dressing-station, their own hospital only seven miles to the rear of them, she had been able to measure up to any situation that had been thrust at her. It was buckle to it, and work furiously, and clean up the mess, and then on to the next. But here was a wide-spread misery that overwhelmed her. Dr. McDonnell was as silent as the girl. He had a sensitiveness to suffering which twenty years of London practice had not dulled.

The day wore along, with spurt after spurt to the front, and then the slower drive back, when Woffington guided the car patiently and skilfully, so that the wounded men inside should not be shaken by the motion. They had a snack of luncheon with them, and ate it while they rode. Their little barrel of water, swinging between the wheels, had long ago gone to fevered men.

"First ambulance I've seen in twenty-four hours," said Captain Davies, as he came on them out of the dusk of Hoogar wood. The stern and unbending organization of the military had found it necessary to hold a hundred or more ambulances of the Royal Army Medical Corps in readiness all day in the market place of Ypres against a sudden evacuation. So there were simply no cars, but their one car, to speed out to the front and gather the wounded.

It was strange, in the evening light, to work out along the road between lines of poplar trees. Dim forms kept pa.s.sing them--two by two, each couple with a stretcher and its burden. An old farm cart came jogging by, wrenching its body from side to side as it struck invisible hummocks and dipped into sh.e.l.l holes. It was loaded with outstretched forms of men, whose wounds were torn at by the jerking of the cart. In companies, fresh men, talking in whispers, were softly padding along the road on their way to the trenches, to relieve the staled fighters. The wide silence was only broken by the occasional sharp clatter and ping of some lonely sniper's rifle.

It was ten o'clock of the evening, and the ambulance had gone out one mile beyond the hamlet of Hoogar. The Doctor and Hilda alighted at the thick wood, which had been hotly contended for, through the seven days.

It had been covered with sh.e.l.l fire as thoroughly as a fis.h.i.+ng-net rakes a stream. They waited for Woffington to turn the car around. It is wise to leave a car headed in the direction of safety, when one is treading on disputed ground.

A man stepped out of the wood.

"Are you Red Cross?" he asked.

"Yes," said Dr. McDonnell, "and we have our motor ambulance here."

"Good!" answered the stranger. "We have some wounded men in the Chateau at the other side of the wood. Come with me."

"How far?" asked Hilda.

"Oh, not more than half a mile."