The Book of Missionary Heroes Part 31

The English doctor was out with the cavalry who were holding back and dispersing the Turkish force.

Then a British officer came and said: "We are moving the camp forward under the protection of the mountains."

It was late afternoon. The cart moved forward into the gathering darkness. Mrs. Shedd crouched beside her husband on the floor of the cart attending to him, expecting the outriders to tell her when they came to the British Camp.

For hours the cart rolled and jolted over the rough mountain roads. At last it stopped, it was so dark they could not see the road. They were in a gully and could not go forward.

"Where is the British camp?" asked Mrs. Shedd.

"We pa.s.sed it miles back on the road," was the reply.

It was a terrible blow: the doctor, the medicines, the comfort, the nursing that would have helped Dr. Shedd were all miles away and he was so ill that it was impossible to drive him back over that rough mountain track in the inky darkness of the night.

There was nothing to do but just stay where they were, send a messenger to the camp for the doctor, and wait for the morning.

"Only a few drops of oil were left in the lantern," Mrs. Shedd tells us, "but I lighted it and looked at Mr. Shedd. I could see that he was very sick indeed and asked two of the men to go back for the doctor.

It was midnight before the doctor reached us.

"The men," Mrs. Shedd continues, "set fire to a deserted cart left by the refugees and this furnished fire and light all night. They arranged for guards in turn and lay down to rest on the roadside.

Hour after hour I crouched in the cart beside my husband ma.s.saging his limbs when cramps attacked him, giving him water frequently, for while he was very cold to the touch, he seemed feverish. We heated the hot water bottle for his feet, and made coffee for him at the blaze; we had no other nourishment. He got weaker and weaker, and a terrible fear tugged at my heart.

"Fifty thousand hunted, terror-stricken refugees had pa.s.sed on; the desolate, rocky mountains loomed above us, darkness was all about us and heaven seemed too far away for prayer to reach. A deserted baby wailed all night not far away. When the doctor came he gave two hypodermic injections and returned to the camp saying we should wait there for him to catch up to us in the morning. After the injections Mr. Shedd rested better but he did not again regain consciousness.

"When the light began to reveal things, I could see the awful change in his face, but I could not believe that he was leaving me. Shortly after light the men told me that we could not wait as they heard fighting behind and it was evident the English were attacked, so in his dying hour we had to take him over the rough, stony road. After an hour or two Capt. Reed and the doctor caught up to us. We drew the cart to the side of the road where soon he drew a few short, sharp breaths--and I was alone."

So the British officers, with a little hoe, on the mountain side dug the grave of this brave American shepherd, who had given his life in defending the a.s.syrian flock from the Turkish wolf. They made the grave just above the road beside a rock; and on it they sprinkled dead gra.s.s so that it might not be seen and polluted by the enemy.

The people Dr. Shedd loved were safe. The enemy, whose bullets he had braved for day after day, was defeated by the British soldiers. But the great American leader, whose tired body had not slept while the a.s.syrians and Armenians were being hunted through the mountains, lies there dreamless on the mountain side.

These are words that broke from the lips of a.s.syrian sheiks when they heard of his death:

"He bore the burdens of the whole nation upon his shoulders to the last breath of his life.

"As long as we obeyed his advice and followed his lead we were safe and prosperous, but when we ceased to do that destruction came upon us. He was, and ever will be, the Moses of the a.s.syrian people."

He lies there where his heart always was--in that land in which the Turk, the a.s.syrian, the Armenian, the Persian, the Russian and the Arab meet; he is there waiting for the others who will go out and take up the work that he has left, the work of carrying to all those eastern peoples the love of the Christ whom Dr. Shedd died in serving.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 63: Born January 25th, 1865. Graduated Marietta College, Ohio, 1887, and Princeton Theological Seminary, 1892.]

CHAPTER XXVI

AN AMERICAN NURSE IN THE GREAT WAR

_E.D. Cushman_

(Time 1914-1920)

_The Turk in Bed_

The cold, clear sunlight of a winter morning on the high plateau of Asia Minor shone into the clean, white ward of a hospital in Konia (the greatest city in the heart of that land). The hospital in which the events that I am going to tell in this story happened is supported by Christian folk in America, and was established by two American medical missionaries, Dr. William S. Dodd, and Dr. Wilfred Post, with Miss Cushman, the head nurse, sharing the general superintendence: other members of the staff are Haralambos, their Armenian dispenser and druggist, and Kleoniki, a Greek nurse trained by Miss Cushman. The author spent the early spring of 1914 at the hospital in Konia, when all the people named above were at work there.

The tinkle of camel-bells as a caravan of laden beasts swung by, the quick pad-pad of donkeys' hoofs, the howl of a Turkish dog, the cry of a child--these and other sounds of the city came through the open window of the ward.

On a bed in the corner of the ward lay a bearded man--a Turk--who lived in this ancient city of Konia (the Iconium of St. Paul's day).

His brown face and grizzled beard were oddly framed in the white of the spotless pillow and sheets.

His face turned to the door as it opened and the matron entered. The eyes of the Turk as he lay there followed her as she walked toward one of her deft, gentle-handed a.s.sistant nurses who, in their neat uniforms with their olive-brown faces framed in dark hair, went from bed to bed tending the patients; giving medicine to a boy here, shaking up a pillow for a sick man there, taking a patient's temperature yonder. Those skilled nurses were Armenian girls. The Armenians are a Christian nation, who have been ruled by the Turks for centuries and often have been ma.s.sacred by them; yet these Armenian girls were nursing the Turks in the hospital. But the matron of the hospital was not a Turk, nor an Armenian. She had come four thousand miles across the sea to heal the Turks and the Armenians in this land.

She was an American.

The Turk in bed turned his eyes from the nurses to a picture on the wall. A frown came on his face. He began to mutter angry words into his beard.

As a Turk he had always been taught, even as a little boy, that the great Prophet Mohammed had told them they must have no pictures of prophets, and he knew from what he had heard that the picture on the wall showed the face of a prophet. It was a picture of a man with a kind, strong face, dressed in garments of the lands of the East, and wearing a short beard. He was stooping down healing a little child. It was our Lord Jesus Christ the Great Physician.

As Miss Cushman--for that was the name of the matron--moved toward his bed, the Turk burst into angry speech.

"Have that picture taken down," he said roughly, pointing to it. She turned to look at the picture and then back at him, and said words like these: "No, that is the picture of Jesus, the great Doctor who lived long ago and taught the people that G.o.d is Love. It is because He taught that, and has called me to follow in His steps, that I am here to help to heal you."

But the Turk, who was not used to having women disobey his commands, again ordered angrily that the picture should be taken down. But the American missionary-nurse said gently, but firmly: "No, the picture must stay there to remind us of Jesus. If you cannot endure to see the picture there, then if you wish you may leave the hospital, of course."

And so she pa.s.sed on. The Turk lay in his bed and thought it over. He wished to get well. If the doctors in this hospital--Dr. Dodd and Dr. Post--did not attend him, and if the nurses did not give him his medicine, he would not. He therefore decided to make no more fuss about the picture. So he lay looking at it, and was rather surprised to find in a few days that he liked to see it there, and that he wanted to hear more and more about the great Prophet-Doctor, Jesus.

Then he had another tussle of wills with Miss Cushman, the white nurse from across the seas. It came about in this way. Women who are Mohammedans keep their faces veiled, but the Armenian Christian nurses had their faces uncovered.

"Surely they are shameless women," he thought in his heart. "And they are Armenians too--Christian infidels!" So he began to treat them rudely. But the white nurse would not stand that.

Miss Cushman went and stood by his bed and said: "I want you to remember that these nurses of mine are here to help you to get well.

They are to you even as daughters tending their father; and you must behave to them as a good father to good daughters."

So the Turk lay in bed and thought about that also. It took him a long time to take it in, for he had always been taught to hate the Armenians and to think low thoughts about their womenfolk. But in the end he learnt that lesson also.

At last the Turk got well, left his bed, and went away. He was so thankful that he was better that he was ready to do just anything in the world that Miss Cushman wanted him to do. The days pa.s.sed on in the hospital, and always the white nurse from across the seas and the Armenian nurses tended the Turkish and other patients, and healed them through the heats of that summer.

_War and Ma.s.sacre_

As summer came near to its end there broke on the world the dreadful day when all Europe went to war. Miss Cushman's colleagues, the American doctors at the hospital, left Konia for service in the war. Soon Turkey entered the war. The fury of the Turks against the Armenians burst out into a flame. You might see in Konia two or three Turks sitting in the shadow of a little saddler's shop by the street smoking their hubble-bubble water-pipes, and saying words like these:

"The Armenians are plotting to help the enemies of Turkey. We shall have to kill them all."

"Yes, wipe them out--the accursed infidels!"