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 shell 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 passing 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 shell 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 shell fire as thoroughly as a fishing-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."

They seeped along over the wet wood road, speaking not at all, as snipers were scattered by night here and there in the trees. They came to the old white building, a country house of size and beauty. In the cellar, three soldiers were lying on straw. Two of them told Hilda they had been lying wounded and uncared for in the trenches since evening of the night before. They had just been brought to the house. She went over to the third, a boy of about eighteen years. He was shot through the biceps muscle of his left arm. He was pale and weak.

"How long have you been like this?" asked the girl.

"Since four o'clock, yesterday," he whispered.

"Thirty hours," said Hilda.

Dr. McDonnell made a request to the officer for help. He gave four men and two stretchers. They put the boy and one of the men on the stretchers, and hoisted them through the cellar window. Woffington and McDonnell took the lantern and searched till they found a wheelbarrow. The third man, wounded in the shoulder, threw an arm over Dr. McDonnell, and Woffington steadied him at the waist. He stumbled up the steps, and collapsed into the barrow.

Woffington and the Doctor took turns in wheeling him through the mud. Hilda walked at their side. The wheel bit deeply into the road under the weight. They had to spell each other, frequently. After a few hundred yards, they met a small detachment of cavalry, advancing toward the house. The horses seemed to feel the tension, and shared in the silence of their drivers, stepping noiselessly through the murk. Woffington was forced to turn the barrow into the ditch. It required the strength of the two men, one at each handle, to shove it out on the road again.

The stretchers had reached the ambulance ahead of the wheelbarrow. They loaded the car hastily—there was no time to swing stretchers. They put the three wounded in on the long wooden seat. The boy with the torn biceps fainted on Hilda's shoulder. She rode in with him. At Hoogar dressing-station, she asked the military doctor for water for the boy. He had come to, and kept whispering—"Water, water."

"I have no water for you," said the Doctor.

A soldier followed her back to the car and gave the lad to drink from his bottle. There was only a swallow in it.

When they reached the Convent, the officer in charge came running out.

"I'll take this load, but that's all," he said. "Can't take any more, full up. Next trip, go on into the town, to Military Hospital Number Three."

They started back toward the wood.

"I've only got petrol enough for one trip, and then home again," said Woffington.

"All the way, then," said the Doctor, "out to the farthest trenches. We'll make a clean sweep."

They shot past Hoogar, and out through the wood, and on to the trenches of the Cheshires. Just back of the mounded earth, the reserves were sleeping in the mud of the road, and on the wet bank of the ditch. The night was dark and silent. A few rods to the right, a shelled barn was blazing.

"Have you any wounded?" asked Dr. McDonnell.

"So many we haven't gathered them in," answered the officer. "What is the use? No one to carry them away."

"I'll carry as many as I can," said the Doctor.

"I'll send for them," replied the captain. He spread his men out in the search. Three wounded were placed in the car, all of them stretcher cases.

"Room for one more stretcher case," said Dr. McDonnell; "the car only holds four."

"Bring the woman," ordered the officer.

His men came carrying an aged peasant woman, grey-haired, heavy, her black dress soggy with dew and blood.

"Here's a poor old woman," explained the captain; "seems to be a Belgian peasant. She was working out in the fields here, while the firing was going on. She was shot in the leg and fell down in the field. She's been lying on her face there all day. Can't you take her out of the way?"

"Surely," said Hilda.

The old woman was heavier than a soldier, heavier and more helpless.

"The car is full," said Hilda; "you have more wounded?"

The officer smiled.

"Of course," he answered; "here come a few of them, now."

The girl counted them. She had to leave twelve men at that farthest trench, because the car was full. On the trip back, she jumped down at the Hoogar dressing-station, and there she found sixteen more men strewed around in the straw, waiting to be removed. Twenty-eight men she had to ride away from.

For the first time in that long day, they went past the Convent-hospital, and on into the city of Ypres itself, down through the Grand Place, and then abruptly through a narrow street to the south. Here they found Military Hospital Number Three. The wounded men were lifted down and into the courtyard. Lastly, the woman.

"Yes, we'll take her," said the good-hearted Tommies, who lent a hand in unloading the car. But their officer was firm.

"We have no room," he said; "we must keep this hospital for the soldiers. I wish I could help you."

"But what am I to do with her?" asked Hilda in dismay.

"I am sorry," said the officer. He walked away.

"The same old story," said Hilda; "no place for the old in war-time. They'll turn us away from all the hospitals. Anyone who isn't a soldier might as well be dead as in trouble."

The old woman lay on the stretcher in the street. Her mouth had fallen open, as if she had weakened her hold on things. There was something beyond repair about her appearance, and something unrebuking, too. "Do with me what you please," she seemed to say, "I shall make no complaint. I am too old and feeble to make you any trouble. Leave me here in the gutter if you like. No one will ever blame you for it, surely not I."

"Lift her back," ordered the Doctor; "we'll go hunting."

He had seen a convent near the market square when they had gone through in the morning. They rode to the door, and pulled the hanging wire. The bell resounded down long corridors. Five minutes passed. Then the bolt was shot, and a sleepy-eyed Sister opened the door, candle in hand.

"Sister, I beg you to take this poor old peasant woman in my car," pleaded Hilda, "she is wounded in the leg."

The Sister made no reply but threw the door wide open, then turned and shuffled off down the stone corridor.

"Come," said Hilda; "we have found a home."

The men lifted the stretcher out, and followed the dim twinkling light down the passage. It turned into a great room. They followed in. Every bed was occupied—perhaps fifty old women sleeping there, grey hair and white hair on the pillows, red coverlets over the beds. To the end of the room they went, where one wee little girl was sleeping. The Sister spread bedding on the floor, and lifted the child from the cot. She stretched herself a moment in the chilly sheets, then settled into sleep, with her face, shut-eyed, upturned toward the light. Hilda sighed with relief. Their work was ended.

"Now for home," she said. "Fifteen and a half hours of work."

It was half an hour after midnight, when they drew up in Ypres market square and glanced down the beautiful length of the Cloth Hall, that building of massive and light-winged proportion. It was the last time they were ever to see it. It has fallen under the shelling, and cannot be rebuilt. They paused to pick their road back to Furnes, for in the darkness it was hard to find the street that led out of the town. They thought they had found it, and went swiftly down to the railway station before they knew their mistake. As they started to turn back and try again, a great shell fell into the little artificial lake just beyond them. It roared under the surface, and then shot up a fountain of water twenty feet high, with edges of white foam.

"It is time to go," said Hilda; "they will send another shell. They always do. They are going to bombard the town."

They spurted back to the square, and as they circled it, still puzzled for the way of escape, two shells went sailing high over them and fell into the town beyond.

"Jack Johnsons," said Woffington. This time, he made the right turn, back of the Cloth Hall into the safe country.

Never had it felt so good to Hilda to leave a place.

"I am afraid," she said to herself. Now she knew why brave men sometimes ran like rabbits.

* * * * *

"Go back to London, and report what we have seen," urged Dr. McDonnell. "We can set England aflame with it. The English people will rise to it, if they know their wounded are being neglected."

"It takes a lot to rouse the English," said Hilda; "that is their greatest quality, their steadiness. In our country we'd have a crusade over the situation, and then we'd forget all about it. But you people won't believe it for another year or so. When you do believe it, you'll cure it."

"You will see," replied the Doctor.

"I'll try," said Hilda.

* * * * *

It was one of those delightful mixed grills in Dover Street, London, where men and women are equally welcome. Dover Street is lined with them, pleasant refuges for the wives of army officers, literary women of distinction, and the host of well-to-do uncelebrated persons, who make the rich background of modern life. Dr. McDonnell's warm friend, the Earl of Tottenham, and his wife, were entertaining Hilda at dinner, and, knowing she had something to tell of conditions at Ypres, they had made Colonel Albert Bevan one of the party.

Hilda thought Colonel Bevan one of the cleverest men she had ever met. He had a quick nervous habit of speech, a clean-shaven alert face, with a smile that threw her off guard and opened the way for the Colonel to make his will prevail. He was enjoying a brilliant Parliamentary career. He had early thrown his lot with the Liberals, and had never found cause to regret it. He had been an under-secretary, and, when the war broke out, Kitchener had chosen him for his private emissary to the fighting line to report back to the Chief the exact situation. He was under no one else than K.; came directly to him with his findings, went from him to the front.

"My dear young lady," the Colonel was saying, "you've forgotten that Ypres was the biggest fight of the war, one of the severest in all history. In a day or two, we got things in hand. You came down on a day when the result was just balanced. It was a toss-up whether the other fellows would come through or not. You see, you took us at a bad time."

"How about the ambulances that weren't working?" asked Hilda. "The square was lined with them."

"I know," responded the Colonel, "but the city was likely to be evacuated at any hour. As a matter of fact, those ambulances were used all night long after the bombardment began, emptying the three military hospitals, and taking the men to the train. We sent them down to Calais. You were most fortunate in getting through the lines at all. I shouldn't have blamed Captain Fitzgerald if he had ordered you back to Furnes."

"Captain Fitzgerald!" exclaimed Hilda. "How did you know I was talking with him?"

"I was there that day in Ypres," said the Colonel.

"You were in Ypres," repeated Hilda, in astonishment.

"I was there," he said; "I saw the whole thing. You came down upon our lines as if you had fallen out of a blue moon. What were we to do? A very charming young American lady, with a very good motor ambulance. It was a visitation, wasn't it? If we allowed it regularly, what would become of the fighting? Why, there are fifty volunteer organizations, with cars and nurses, cooling their heels in Boulogne. If we let one in, we should have to let them all come. There wouldn't be any room for troops."

"But how about the wounded?" queried Hilda. "Where do they come in?"

"In many cases, it doesn't hurt them to lie out in the open air," responded the Colonel; "that was proved in the South African War. The wounds often heal if you leave them alone in the open air. But you people come along and stir up and joggle them. In army slang, we call you the body snatchers."

"What you say about the wounded is absurd," replied Hilda.

"Tut, tut," chided the Colonel.

"I mean just that," returned the girl, with heat. "It is terrible to leave men lying out who have got wounded. It is all rot to say the open air does them good. If the wound was clean from a bullet, and the air pure, and the soil fresh as in a new country, that would be true in some of the cases. The wound would heal itself. But a lot of the wounds are from jagged bits of shell, driving pieces of clothing and mud from the trenches into the flesh. The air is septic, full of disease from the dead men. They lie so close to the surface that a shell, anywhere near, brings them up. Three quarters of your casualties are from disease. The wound doesn't heal; it gets gangrene and tetanus from the stale old soil. And instead of having a good fighting man back in trim in a fortnight, you have a sick man in a London hospital for a couple of months, and a cripple for a lifetime."

"You would make a good special pleader," responded the Colonel with a bow. "I applaud your spirit, but the wounded are not so important, you know. There are other considerations that come ahead of the wounded."

"But don't the wounded come first?" asked Hilda, in a hurt tone.

"Certainly not," answered the Colonel. "We have to keep the roads clear for military necessity. This is the order in which we have to regard the use of roads in war-time." He checked off his list on his fingers—

"First comes ammunition, then food, then reinforcements, and fourth, the wounded."



IN RAMSKAPPELE BARNYARD

Thirteen dead men were scattered about in the straw and dung. Some of them were sitting in absurd postures, as if they were actors in a pantomime. Others of them, though burned and shattered, lay peacefully at full length. No impress of torture could any longer rob them of the rest on which they had entered so suddenly. I saw that each one of them had come to the end of his quest and had found the thing for which he had been searching. The Frenchman had his equality now. The German had doubtless by this time, found his God "a mighty fortress." The Belgian had won a neutrality which nothing would ever invade.

As I looked on that barnyard of dead, I was glad for them that they were dead, and not as the men I had seen in the hospital wards—the German with his leg being sawn off, and the strange bloated face of the Belgian: all those maimed and broken men condemned to live and carry on the living flesh the pranks of shell fire. For it was surely better to be torn to pieces and to die than to be sent forth a jest.



VI

THE CHEVALIER

Hilda's friends in England had prepared a "surprise" for her. It was engineered by a wise and energetic old lady in London, who had been charmed with the daring of the American girl at the front. So, without Hilda's knowledge, she published the following advertisement:—

"'HILDA'—Will every Hilda, big and little, in Great Britain and Ireland, send contributions for a 'Hilda' motor ambulance, costing L500, to be sent for service in Pervyse, to save wounded Belgian soldiers from suffering? It will be run by a nurse named Hilda. 'Lady Hildas' subscribe a guinea, 'Hildas' over sixteen, half-guinea, 'Little Hildas', and 'Hildas' in straightened circumstances, two-shillings-and-sixpence."

That was the "Personal" on the front page of the London Times, which had gone out over the land.

Hilda's life at the front had appealed to the imagination of some thousands of the Belgian soldiers, and to many officers. The fame of her and of her two companions had grown with each week of the wearing, perilous service, hard by the Belgian trenches. Gradually there had drifted out of the marsh-land hints and broken bits of the life-saving work of these Pervyse girls, all the way back to England. The Hildas of the realm had rallied, and funds flowed into the London office, till a swift commodious car was purchased, and shipped out to the young nurse.

And now Hilda's car had actually come to her, there at the dressing-station in Pervyse. The brand new motor ambulance was standing in the roadway, waiting her need. Its brown canopy was shiny in the sun. A huge Red Cross adorned either side with a crimson splash that ought to be visible on a dark night. The thirty horse-power engine purred and obeyed with the sympathy of a high-strung horse. Seats and stretchers inside were clean and fresh for stricken men. From Hilda's own home town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, had come a friendship's garland of one hundred dollars. She liked to fancy that this particular sum of money had passed into the front wheels, where the speed was generated.

"My car, my very own," she murmured. She dreamed about it, and carried it in her thoughts by day. She had fine rushes of feeling about it, too. It must do worthy work, she said to herself. There could be no retreating from bad pockets with that car. There must be no leaving the wounded, when the firing cuts close, no joy-riding.

She could not help feeling proud of her position. There was no other woman out of all America who had won through to the front. And on all the Western battle-line of four hundred miles, there were no other women, save her and her two friends, who were doing just this sort of dangerous touch-and-go work. With her own eyes she had read the letters of more than two hundred persons, begging permission to join the Corps. There were women of title, professional men of standing. What had she done to deserve such lucky eminence? Why was she chosen to serve at the furthest outpost where risk and opportunity went hand in hand?

Dr. Neil McDonnell, leader of the Ambulance Corps, had brought a party of her friends from Furnes, to celebrate the coming of the car. Dr. McDonnell was delighted with every success achieved by his "children." When the three women went to Pervyse, and the fame of them spread through the Belgian Army, the Doctor was as happy as if a grandchild had won the Derby. He was glad when Mrs. Bracher and "Scotch" received the purple ribbon and the starry silver medal for faithful service in a parlous place. He was now very happy that Hilda's fame had sprung to England, taken root, and bloomed in so choice a way. He had a curiously sweet nature, the Doctor, a nature without animosities, absent-minded, filmed with dreams, and those dreams large, bold and kindly.

"Your car is better than a medal," he said; "a medal can't save life, but this car will. This is as good as an endowed hospital bed. It's like the King's touch; it heals everyone who comes near. May its shadow never grow less."

"I hope they won't shoot away its bonnet," said Hilda; "there's nothing so dead-looking as a wrecked ambulance. I saw one the other day on the Oestkirke road. It looked like a summer-resort place in winter."

"No danger," replied the Doctor, who was of a buoyant cast; "you are born lucky. You're one of the Fortunate Seven. You know there are Seven Fortunate born in each generation. All the good things come to them without striving. You are one of the Fortunate Seven."

"We shall see," responded Hilda.

The Doctor was just starting back to Furnes, when he remembered what he had come for.

"By the way," he called to Hilda, "what driver do you want?"

"Smith, of course," she answered. "Whom could I want but Smith? He is quite the bravest man I have met in the twenty weeks out here."

"He's only a chauffeur," remarked one of the Corps.

"Only a chauffeur," echoed Hilda; "only the man who runs the car and picks up the wounded, and straps in the stretchers. Give me Smith, every time—" she ended.

"He looks like a hero, doesn't he?" said the same member of the Corps.

"No, he doesn't," laughed Hilda, "and that's the joke."

* * * * *

Smith reported for duty early next morning.

"We must christen the car in some real way," she said. "How shall it be, Smith?"

"Dixmude," he answered. He generally dealt in replies of one word. He was a city lad, slight in frame, of pale, tired face.

"Yes, there is always work at Dixmude," Hilda agreed.

They started on the six-mile run.

"What do you think of using black troops against white, miss?" asked Smith, after they had bowled along for a few minutes.

"I'm not a warlike person," replied Hilda, "so I don't know what's the proper thing. But, just the same, I don't like to see them using black men. They don't know what they're fighting about. Anyway, I'd rather help them, than shoot them."

"It isn't their fault, is it, miss?" said Smith.

"By no means," returned Hilda; "they deserve all the more help because they are ignorant."

"That's right enough, too," agreed Smith and relapsed into his constitutional silence. He had a quiet way with him, which was particularly agreeable when the outer air was tense.

They rode on into Dixmude. The little city had been torn into shreds, as a sail is torn by a hurricane. But the ruined place was still treated from time to time with shell fire, lest any troops should make the charred wreckage a cover for advancing toward the enemy trenches. They rode on to where they caught a flash of soldiers' uniform.

In a blackened butt of an inn, a group of Senegalese were hiding. They were great six-foot fellows, with straight bodies, and shoulders for carrying weights—the face a black mask, expressionless, save for the rolling whites of the eyes, and the sudden startling grin of perfect white teeth, when trouble fell out of the sky. They had been left there to hold the furthest outpost. A dozen of them were hale and cheery. Two of them sat patiently in the straw, nursing each a damaged arm. Out in the gutter, fifty feet away, one sat picking at his left leg. Smith turned the car, half around, then backed it toward the ditch, then forward again, and so around, till at last he had it headed back along the road they had come. Then he brought it to a standstill, leaving the power on, so that the frame of the car shook, as the body of a hunting dog shakes before it is let loose from the leash.

There was a wail in the air overhead, a wail and then a roar, as a shell cut close over the hood of the ambulance and exploded in the low wall of the house opposite. Three more came more quickly than one could count aloud.

"Four; a battery of four," said Hilda.

The enemy artillery had sighted their ambulance, and believing it to contain reinforcements or ammunition, were leveling their destruction at it. The high car with its brown canvas covering was a fair mark in the clear morning light. Hilda motioned the two wounded men in the inn to come to the car. They slowly rose to their feet, and patiently trudged out into the road. Smith gave them a hand, and they climbed upon the footboard of the ambulance, and over into the interior. One of the black men called harshly to the man in the ditch down the road. He turned from his sitting posture, fell over on his face, and then came crawling on his hands and knees.

"Why doesn't he walk?" asked Hilda.

"Foot shot away," replied Smith.

She saw the raw, red flesh of the lower leg, as if the work of his maker had been left incompleted. Again in the air there was the moan of travelling metal, then the heavy thud of its impact, the roar as it released its explosive, and the shower of brick dust, iron and pebbles. Again, the following three, sharp and close, one on the track of the other.

"They've got our range all right," said Smith.

The black man, trailing his left leg, seemed slow in coming, as he scratched along over the ground. This is surely death, Hilda said to herself, and she felt it would be good to die just so. She had not been a very sinful person, but she well knew there had been much in her way of doing things to be sorry for. She had spoken harshly, and acted cruelly. She had brought suffering to other lives with her charm. And, suddenly in this flash of clear seeing, she knew that by this single act of standing there, waiting, she had wiped out the wrong-doing, and found forgiveness. She knew she could face the dark as blithely as if she were going to her bridal. Strange how the images of an old-fashioned and outgrown religion came back upon her in this instant. Strange that she should feel this act was bringing her an atonement and that she could meet death without a tremor. The gods beyond this gloom were going to be good to her, she knew it. They would salute Smith and herself, as comrades unafraid.

She was glad, too, that her last sight of things would be the look at the homely face of Smith, as he stood there at his full height, which was always a little bent, very much untroubled by the passing menace. She did not know that there was anyone with whom she would rather go down than with the ignorant boy, who was holding his life cheap for a crippled black man. Somehow, being with him in this hour, connected her with the past of her own life, for, after her fashion, she had tried to be true to her idea of equality. She had always felt that such as he were worthy of the highest things in life. And there he stood, proving it. That there was nobody beside herself to see him, struck her as just a part of the general injustice. If he had been a great captain, doing this thing, he would go down a memory to many. Being an unknown lad of the lower class, he would be as little recognized in his death as in life. It was strange what racing and comprehensive work her brain compassed in a little moment. It painted by flashes and crowded its canvas with the figures of a life-time. Only those who have not lived such a moment, doubt this.

Then came two more shells, this time just in front of the car and low. And now the negro, creeping along, had reached the car. Smith and Hilda lifted him in, and waved good-bye to the black men flattened against the wall of the inn. Smith put on power, and they raced to the turn of the road.

There at the cross-roads, on horseback, was Hilda's faithful and gallant friend, Commandant Jost, friend of the King's. He was using his field-glasses on the road down which they had sped.

"C'est chaud," called Hilda to her old friend, "it was lively."

"Yes," he answered soberly. "I just came up in time to see you. I didn't know it was you. I have been watching your car with my glasses. They nearly hit you. I counted ten reports into the street where you were."

"Yes," returned Hilda, "but all's well that ends well."

"How many men did you rescue?" asked the Commandant.

"Three," answered the girl; "the last fellow came slowly. His foot was bad."

The Commandant dismounted and came round to the back of the car. He threw up the hood.

"You did this for black men?" he said slowly.

"Why not?" asked Hilda in surprise. "If they're good enough to fight for us, they're good enough to save."

"The King shall know of this," he said; "it means a decoration. I will see to it."

Hilda's face lighted up for an instant. Then the glow died down; she became grave.

"If anything comes of this," she said simply, "it goes to Smith. I must insist on that."

"There is just one thing about it," replied the Commandant. "We cannot give our decorations around wholesale. The King wishes to keep them choice by keeping them rare. Now it really will not do to add two more decorations to your little group. Two of your women have already received them. This was a brave piece of work—one of the bravest I ever saw. It deserves a ribbon. It shall have a ribbon, if I can reach the King. But two ribbons, no. It cannot be."

"Ah, you don't need to tell me that," returned Hilda. "I know that. One decoration is quite enough. But that decoration, if granted, must go to Smith."

* * * * *

The highest honor in the gift of the King of the Belgians was being conferred: a Red Cross worker was about to be made Chevalier of the Order of Leopold. Doubtless one would rather be decorated by Albert than by any other person in the world. It was plain already that he was going down into history as one of the fabulous good rulers, with Alfred and Saint Louis, who had been as noble in their secret heart as in their pride of place. It was fitting that the brief ceremony should be held in Albert's wrecked village of Pervyse, with shell pits in the road, and black stumps of ruin for every glance of the eye. For he was no King of prosperity, fat with the pomp of power. He was a man of sorrows, the brother of his crucified people.

But the man who was about to be honored kept getting lost. The distinguished statesmen, officers, and visiting English, formed their group and chatted. But the object of their coming together was seldom in sight. He disappeared indoors to feed the wasted cat that had lived through three bombardments and sought her meat in wrecked homes. He was blotted out by the "Hilda" car, as he tinkered with its intimacies. No man ever looked less like a Chevalier, than Smith, when discovered and conducted to the King. Any of the little naval boy officers standing around with their gold braid on the purple cloth, looked gaudier than Smith. He looked more like a background, with his weather-worn khaki, and narrow, high-hitched shoulders, than like the center-piece in a public performance.

There came a brief and painful moment, when the King's favor was pinned upon him.

"The show is over, isn't it?" he asked.

Hilda smiled.

"I suppose you'll go and bury the medal in an old trunk in the attic," she said.

Smith walked across to the car, and opened the bonnet. The group of distinguished people had lost interest in him. Hilda followed him over.

"You're most as proud of that car as I am," she said; "it's sort of your car, too, isn't it?"

Smith was burrowing into the interior of things, and had already succeeded in smearing his fingers with grease within three minutes of becoming a Chevalier.

"Fact is, ma'am," he answered, "it is my car, in a way. You see, my mother's name is Hilda, same as yours. My mother, she gave half-a-crown for it."



WITH THE AMBULANCE

We were carrying a dead man among the living.

"Take him out and leave him," ordered our officer; "it is bad for the wounded men riding next to him and under him."

We lifted him down from his swinging perch in the car. He was heavy at the shoulders to shift. The dead seem heavier than the quick. We stretched him at full length in the sticky mud of the gutter at the side of the road. He lay there, white face and wide eyes in the night, as if frozen in his pain. Soldiers, stumbling to their supper, brushed against his stiff body and then swerved when they saw the thing which they had touched. A group of doctors and officers moved away. Mud from the sloughing tires of the transports spattered him, but not enough to cover him. No one had time to give him his resting-place. We were too busy with the fresher shambles, and their incompleted products, to pause for a piece of work so finished as that cold corpse.

But no indignity of the roadway can long withhold him from his portion of peace, and the land that awakened his courage will receive him at last. There is more companionship under the ground than above it for one who has been gallant against odds.



VII

THE AMERICAN

"Atrocities, rubbish!" said the man. "A few drunken soldiers, yes. Every war has had them. But that's nothing. They're all a bunch of crazy children, both sides, and pretty soon they'll quiet down. In the meantime," he added with a smile, "we take the profits—some of us, that is."

"Is that all the war means to you?" asked Hilda.

"Yes, and to any sensible person," replied he. "Why do you want to go and get yourself mixed up in it? An American belongs out of it. Go and work in a settlement at home and let the foreign countries stew in their own juice."

"Belgium doesn't seem like a foreign country to me," returned the girl. "You see, I know the people. I know young Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville and Commandant Gilson, with the wound on his face, and the boys that come into the Flandria Hospital with their fingers shot away. They are like members of my family. They did something for me."

"How do you make that out?"

The girl was silent for a moment, then she answered:

"They stood up for what was a matter of honor. They made a fight against odds. They could have sold out easy enough."

"Well, I don't know," said the man, stretching his arms and yawning.

"No, that's just the trouble with men like you. You don't know, and you don't care to know. You're all alike; you stand aloof or amused. A great human wrong has taken place, and you say, 'Well, I don't know!'"

"Just a moment," interrupted the man.

"But I haven't finished," went on the girl; "there's another thing I want to say. When Belgium made her fight, she suffered horrible things. Her women and children were mutilated on system, as part of a cold policy. Cruelty to the unoffending, that is what I mean by atrocities."

"I don't believe you," retorted the man.

"Come and see."

Hilda, who had run across from Ghent to London to stock up on supplies for the Corps, was talking with John Hinchcliffe, American banker, broker, financier. He was an old-time friend of Hilda's family—a young widower, in that successful period of early middle-age when the hard work and the dirty work have availed and the momentum of the career maintains itself. In the prematurely gray hair, the good-looking face, the abrupt speech, he was very much American. He was neat—neat in his way of dressing, and in his compact phrases, as hard and well-rounded as a pebble. The world to him was a place full of slackers, of lazy good-nature, of inefficiency. Into that softness he had come with a high explosive and an aim. He moved through life as a hunter among a covey of tame partridges—a brief flutter and a tumble of soft flesh. He had the cunning lines about the mouth, the glint in the eye, of the successful man. He had the easy generosities, too, of the man who, possessing much, can express power by endowing helpless things which he happens to like. There was an abundant sentiment in him, sentiment about his daughter and his flag, and the economic glory of his times. He was rather proud of that soft spot in his make-up. When men spoke of him as hard, he smiled to himself, for there in his consciousness was that streak of emotional richness. If he were attacked for raiding a trolley system, he felt that his intimates would declare, "You don't know him. Why John is a King."

And, best of all, he had a kind of dim vision of how his little daughter would come forward at the Day of Judgment, if there was anything of the sort, and say, "He was the best father in the world."

Hilda and the banker sat quietly, each busy in thought with what had been said. Then the girl returned to her plea.

"Come now, Mr. Hinchcliffe," she said, "you've challenged every statement I've made, and yet you've never once been on the ground. I am living there, working each day, where things are happening. Now, why don't you come and see for yourself? It would do you a lot of good."

"I'm over here on business," objected the banker.

"Perfect reply of a true American," retorted Hilda, hotly. "Here are three or four nations fighting for your future, saving values for your own sons and grandsons. And you're too busy to inform yourself as to the rights of it. You prefer to sit on the fence and pluck the profits. You would just as lief sell to the Germans as to the Allies, if the money lay that way and no risk."

"Sure. I did, in September," said the banker, with a grin; "shipped 'em in by way of Holland."

"Yes," said Hilda, angrily, "and it was dirty money you made."

"What would you have us do?" asked he. "We're not in business for our health."

"I tell you what I'd have you do," returned Hilda. "I'd have you find out which side was in the right in the biggest struggle of the ages. If necessary, I'd have you take as much time to informing yourself as you'd give to learning about a railroad stock which you were going to buy. Here's the biggest thing that ever was, right in front of you, and you don't even know which side is right. You can't spare three days to find out whether a nation of people is being done to death."

"What next?" asked the banker with a smile. "When I have informed myself, what then? Go and sell all that I have and give to the poor?"

"No, I don't ask you to come up to the level of the Belgians," answered Hilda, "or of the London street boys. But what can be asked even of a New York banker is that he shall sell to the side that is in the right. And when he does it, that he shall not make excessive profits."

"Run business by the Golden Rule?"

"No, not that, but just catch a little of the same spirit that is being shown by millions of the common people over there. Human nature isn't half as selfish and cowardly as men like you make out. You'll burn your fingers if you try to put a tag on these peasants and shop-assistants and clerks, over here. They're not afraid to die. The modern man is all right, but you fellows at the top don't give him half a chance. A whole race of peasants can be burned out and mutilated, and it doesn't cause a flutter in the pulse-beat of one of you American traders."

"You're a damn poor American," said the banker bluntly.

"You're the poor American," replied Hilda. "An uncle of mine, with a few 'greats' in front of him, was one of the three to sign the Declaration of Independence for Connecticut. Another of us was in Lincoln's Cabinet. My people have helped to make our country. We were the ones that welcomed Louis Kossuth, and Garibaldi. We are Americans. It's men like you that have weakened the strain—you and your clever tricks and your unbelief. You believe in nothing but success. 'Money is power,' say you. It is you that don't believe in America, not I."

"What does it all come to?" he broke in harshly. "What is it all about? You talk heatedly but what are you saying? I have given money to the Relief Work. I've done something, I've got results. Where would you have been without money?"

"Money!" said Hilda. "A thousandth part of your makings. And these people are giving their life! Why, once or twice a day, they are putting themselves between wounded men and shell fire. You talk about results. There are more results in pulling one Belgian out of the bloody dust than in your lifetime of shaving the market."

The color came into his face with a rush. He was so used to expressing power, sitting silent and a little grim, and moving weaker men to his will, that it was a new experience to be talked to by a person who quite visibly had vital force.

"I used to be afraid of people like you," she went on. "But you don't look half as big to me now as one of these young chauffeurs who take in the wounded under shrapnel. You've come to regard your directive ability as something sacred. You think you can sit in moral judgment on these people over here—these boys that are flinging away their lives for the future. Come with me to Belgium, and find out what they're really fighting about."

Hinchcliffe was used to swift decisions.

"I'll do it," he said.

* * * * *

Hilda took him straight to Ghent. Then she pushed her inquiries out among her Belgian friends. The day before, there had been a savage fight at Alost.

"You will find what you want in Wetteren Hospital," suggested Monsieur Caron, Secretary of the Ghent Red Cross, to Hilda.

"To-morrow, we will go there," she said.

That first evening, she led Hinchcliffe through Ghent. In her weeks of work there, she had come to love the beautiful old town. It was strangely unlike her home cities—the brisk prairie "parlor city," where she had grown up inch by inch, as it extended itself acre by acre, and the mad modern city where she had struggled for her bread. The tide of slaughter was still to the east: a low rumble, like surf on a far-away beach. Sometimes it came whinnying and licking at the very doorstep, and then ebbed back, but never rolled up on the ancient city. It was only an under-hum to merriment. It sharpened the nerve of response to whatever passing excellence there was in the old streets and vivid gardens. Modern cities are portions of a world in the making. But Ghent was a completed and placid thing, as fair as men could fashion it.

As evening fell, they two leaned on St. Michel's bridge of the River Lys. Just under the loiterers, canals that wound their way from inland cities to the sea were dark and noiseless, as if sleep held them. The blunt-nosed boats of wide girth that trafficked down those calm reaches were as motionless as the waters that floated them. Out of the upper air, bells from high towers dropped their carillon on a population making its peace with the ended day. Cathedral and churches and belfry were massed against the night, cutting it with their pinnacles till they entered the region of the early stars and the climbing moon.

Then, when that trance of peace had given them the light sadness which fulfilled beauty brings, they found it good to hasten down the deserted street to the cafes and thronging friendly people. They knew how to live and take their pleasure, those people of Ghent. No sullen silence and hasty gorging for them. They practised a leisurely dining and an eager talk, a zest in the flying moment. Their streets were blocked to the curb with little round occupied tables. Inner rooms were bright with lights and friendly with voices. From the silver strainer of the "filtered coffee" the hot drops fell through to the glass, one by one, black and potent. Good coffee, and a gay race.

But those lively people knew in their hearts that a doom was on its way, so their evenings had the merit of a vanishing pleasure, a benefit not to be renewed with the seasons. Time for the people of Ghent carried the grace of last days, when everything that is pleasant and care-free is almost over, and every greeting of a comrade is touched with Vale. It is the little things that are to be lost, so to the little things the time remaining is given. It is then one learns that little things are the dearest, the light-hearted supper in the pleasant cafe with the friend whose talk satisfies, the walk down street past familiar windows, the look of roofs and steeples dim in the evening light.

"It's different, isn't it?" said the banker thoughtfully.

"Yes," agreed Hilda; "it isn't much like Chicago."

"Think of destroying places like this!" went on Hinchcliffe. "Why, they can't rebuild them."

"No," laughed Hilda; "this sort of ancestral thing isn't quite in our line."

"How foolish of them to go to war!" continued the banker. When his mind once gripped an idea, it carried it through to the terminal station. Hilda turned on him vigorously.

"You realize, don't you," she said, "that Belgium didn't bring on this war? You remember that it was some one else that came pouncing down upon her. It seems almost a pity, doesn't it, to smash this beauty and hunt these nice people?"

"It's all wrong," he said; "it's all wrong."

* * * * *

Wetteren Hospital—brick walls and stone floors, the clatter of wooden shoes in the outer corridor, where peasants shuffled. In two inner rooms, where eleven cots stood, there was a hush, for there lay the grievously wounded. Eleven peasants they were, men, women, and a child. A priest was ministering cheer to them, bed by bed. Four Sisters were busy and noiseless in service. The priest led Hilda and Hinchcliffe to the cot of one of the men. The peasant's face was pallid, and the cheeks sunken from loss of blood. The priest addressed him in Flemish, telling him these two were friendly visitors, and wished to know what had been done to him. Quietly and sadly the man in the bed spoke. Sentence by sentence the priest translated it for Hilda and the banker. On Sunday morning, the peasant, Leopold de Man, of Number 90 Hovenier Straat, Alost, was hiding in the house of his sister, in the cellar. The Germans made a fire of the table and chairs in the upper room. Then catching sight of Leopold, they struck him with the butt of their guns, and forced him to pass through the fire. Then, taking him outside, they struck him to the ground, and gave him a blow over the head with a gun stock, and a cut of the bayonet which pierced his thigh, all the way through.

Slowly, carefully, he went on with his statement:

"In spite of my wound they make me pass between their lines, giving me still more blows of the gun-butt in the back, in order to make me march. There are seventeen or eighteen persons with me. They place us in front of their lines and menace us with their revolvers, crying out that they will make us pay for the losses they have suffered at Alost. So, we march in front of the troops.

"When the battle begins, we throw ourselves on our faces to the ground, but they force us to rise again. At a certain moment, when the Germans are obliged to retire, we succeed in escaping down side streets."

Hilda was watching Hinchcliffe while the peasant and the priest were speaking. Curiously and sympathetically she watched him. A change had come over the man: something arrogant had left him. Even his voice had changed, as he leaned forward and asked, "What does he say?" The banker had pulled out a black leather note-book, and was taking down the translation as the priest gave it. Something kindly welled up inside Hilda toward him. Something spoke to her heart that it was the crust of him that had fallen away. She had misjudged him. In her swift way she had been unjust. Her countryman was not hard, only unseeing. Things hadn't been brought to his attention. She was humbly glad that she had cared to show him where the right of things lay. Her fault was greater than his. He had only been blind. Distance had hidden the truth from him. But she had been severe with him to his face. She had committed the sin of pride, the sin of feeling a spiritual superiority.

"If you please, come to the other side of the room," said the priest, leading the way to the cot of a peasant, whose cheeks had the angry red spot of fever. He was Frans Meulebroeck, of Number 62 Drie Sleutelstraat, Alost. Sometimes in loud bursts of terror and suffering, and then falling back into a hopeless pain-laden monotone, he told his story.

"They broke open the door of my home," he said; "they seized me, and knocked me down. In front of my door, the corpse of a German lay stretched out. The Germans said to me, 'You are going to pay for that to us.' A few moments later, they gave me a bayonet cut in my leg. They sprinkled naphtha in my house, and set it afire. My son was struck down in the street, and I was marched in front of the German troops. I do not know even yet the fate of my son."

Gradually as the peasant talked, the time of his suffering came upon him. His eyes began to see it again in front of him. They became fixed and wild, the white of them visible. His voice was shrill and broken with sobs. There was a helpless unresisting agony in his tone and the look on his face.

"My boy!" he said. "I haven't seen him." His body shook with sobbing.

"Enough," said the priest. "Bonne chance, comrade; courage."

In the presence of the priest and of the Sister, the two peasants signed each man his statement, Leopold firmly, the fevered Frans making his mark with a trembling hand. Hinchcliffe shut his note-book and put it back into his pocket.

The little group passed into the next room, where the wounded women were gathered. A Sister led Hilda to the bedside of a very old woman, perhaps eighty years old. The eyes were closed, the thin white hair straggled across the pillow. There was no motion to the worn-out body, except for faint breathing.

"Cut through the thigh with a bayonet," said the Sister.

Hilda stepped away on tiptoe, and looked across the ward. There, rising out of the bedclothes, was a little head, a child's head, crowned with the lightest of hair. Gay and vivid it gleamed in that room of pain. It was hair of the very color of Hilda's own. The child was propped up in bed, and half bent over, as if she had been broken at the breast-bone. It was the attitude of a bent old body, weary with age. And yet, the tiny oval face of soft coloring, and the bright hair, seemed made for happiness.

Clear across the room, otherwise so silent in its patient misery, there came a little whistling from the body of the child. With each give of the breath, the sound was forced out. The wheezing, as if the falling breath caught on some jagged bit of bone, and struggled for a moment to tear itself free, hurt Hilda.

The face of the little girl was heavy with stupor, the eyes half closed. Pain had done its utmost, and a partial unconsciousness was spreading over troubled mind and tortured body. The final release was close at hand.

Hinchcliffe had stepped up. There was an intent look in his face as he watched the child. Then the man's expression softened. The cunning lines about the mouth took on something of tenderness. The shrewd, appraising eyes lost their glint under a film of tears. He went over to the little one, and touched her very lightly on the hair. It was bright and gay, and incongruous on a body that was so visibly dying. It gave a pleasure of sunlight on what was doomed. Still she went on whistling through her broken body, and with each breath she gave a low murmur of pain.

"Sister," said Hilda, to one of the women, "what is it with the child? She is very ill?"

"She is dying," said the nurse. "Her back is slashed open to the bone with bayonets. She was placed in front of the troops, and they cut her, when she fell in fright."

"And her breathing?" asked Hilda. "I can hear her with each breath."

"Yes, it is hard with her. Her body is torn, and the breath is loud as it comes. It will soon be over. She will not suffer long."

Hilda and her companion stepped out into the open air, and climbed into the waiting motor. The banker was crying and swearing softly to himself.

"The little children who have died, what becomes of them?" said Hilda. "Will they have a chance to play somewhere? And the children still in pain, here and everywhere in Belgium—will it be made up to them? Will a million of indemnity give them back their playtime? That little girl whom you touched—"

"The hair," he said, "did you see her hair? The same color as yours."

"I know," said Hilda, "I saw myself in her place. I feel that I could go out and kill."

"It was the hair," repeated the banker. "My little daughter's hair is the color of yours. That was why I let you say those things to me that evening in London. I could not sleep that night for thinking of all you said. And when I looked across the room just now, I thought it was my daughter lying there. For a moment, I thought I saw my daughter."



THE BONFIRE

We were prisoners, together—twenty-seven peasants and three of us that had been too curious of the enemy's camp. We were huddled in the dirt of a field, with four sentries over us, and three thousand soldiers round about us. Just across the country road, twenty-six little yellow-brick houses were blazing, the homes of the peasants of Melle. Each house was a separate torch, for they had been carefully primed with oil. The light of them, and almost the heat, was on our faces. It was a clear, warm evening. The fires of the cottages burned high. A full moon rose blood-red on the horizon, climbed to the dome and went across the sky to the south-west. Two dogs, chained in the yard of a burning house, howled all night. The peasant lying next us watched his home burn to pieces. It was straight across from us. A soldier came to tell him that his wife was wounded but not dead. He lay through the night, motionless, and not once did he turn his eyes away from the blaze of his home. Petrol burns slowly and thoroughly.

In the early morning, soldiers with stretchers came marching down the road. They turned in at the smouldering cottages. From the ruins of the little house which the peasant had watched so intently, three bodies were carried. He broke into a long, slow sobbing.



VIII

THE WAR BABY

"A baby?" cried Hilda in amazement.

"A baby, my dear," repeated Mrs. Bracher with emphasis. "Come, hurry up! We're wanted tout de suite."

The women had been sitting quite peacefully after supper. A jerk at the bell cord, a tiny tinkle, and Mrs. Bracher had answered the door. A big breathless civilian stood there. He said—

"Please, the Madame Doctor, quick. The baby is coming."

These astonishing peasants! Hilda could never get over her wonder at their stolidity, their endless patience, their matter-of-fact way of carrying on life under a cataclysm. They went on with their spading in the fields, while shrapnel was pinging. They trotted up and down a road that was pock-marked with shell-holes. They hung out their washings where machine-gun bullets could aerate them. The fierce, early weeks of shattering bombardment had sent the villagers scurrying for shelter to places farther to the west. And for a time, Pervyse had been occupied only by soldiers and the three nurses. But soon the civilians came trickling back. They were tired of strange quarters, and homesick for their own. There were now more than two hundred peasants in Pervyse—men, women and children. The children, regardless of shell fire, scoured the fields for shrapnel bullets and bits of shells. They brought their findings to the nurses, and received pieces of chocolate in return. There was a family of five children, in steps, who wore bright red hoods. They liked to come and be nursed. The women had from six to a dozen peasants a day, tinkling the bell for treatment. Some came out of curiosity. To these was fed castor-oil. One dose cured them. They came with every sort of ailment. A store-keeper, who kept on selling rock candy, had a heel that was "bad" from shrapnel. One mite of a boy had his right hand burned, and the wound continued to suppurate. He dabbled in ditch-water, and always returned to Hilda with the bandage very wet and dirty.

Here was their home—Belgium, flowering and happy, or Belgium, black and perishing. Still it is Belgium, the homeland. Why take on the ugly hazards of exile?

If your husband is ill and broken, you stay by him. He is your man. So with the land of your birth, the village where you are one with the soil. You stay and suffer, and meantime you live. Still you plant and plough, though the guns are loud in the night, and Les Bosches just over the meadow. And here was one of these women in the wrecked, charred village of Pervyse carrying on the great, natural process of life as unperturbed as if her home was in a valley of peace.

The three women ran over to a little house two hundred yards down the road. One wall of it was bullet-chipped, one room of it a wreck from a spent obus. But, for the rest, it was a livable little place, and here was gathered a Flemish family. The event was half over, as Mrs. Bracher, closely followed by Scotch and Hilda, rushed in. The mother, fully dressed, was lying on a wooden bed that fitted into an alcove. She was typically Flemish, of high cheek-bones and very red cheeks. The entire family was grouped about the bed—a boy of twelve years, a girl of nineteen, and a girl of three. Attending the case, was a little old woman, the grandmother, wearing a knitted knobby bonnet, sitting high on the top of her head and tied under her chin—a conical frame for her pert, dark eyes and firm mouth. She was a tiny woman, every detail of her in miniature, clearly defined, except the heavy, noisy wooden shoes. She carried in her personality an air of important indignation. With the confidence of a lifetime of obstetrical experience, she drew from her pocket a brown string, coarse and dirty, and tied up the newcomer's navel. It was little the nurses were allowed to help. Though a trained and certificated midwife, Mrs. Bracher was edged out of the ministration by the small, determined grandmother, who looked anger and scorn out of her little black eyes upon the three. She resented their coming. Antiseptic gauze and hot-water bottles were as alien as the Germans to her.

So "Pervyse" entered this world. Nothing could hold him back, neither shell nor bayonets. He had slipped through the net of death which men were so busily weaving. There he was, a matter of fact—a vital, lusty, shapeless fact. To that little creature was given the future, and he was stronger than the artillery. By all the laws, vibrations of fear ought to have passed into the tiny body. His consciousness, it would seem, must be a nest of horrors. Instead of that, his cry had the insistence of health. His solemnity was as abysmal as that of a child of peace.

When the girls visited "Pervyse" next morning, the grandmother was nursing him with sugar and water from a quart bottle. She had him dressed in dark blue calico. Thereafter twice a day they called upon him, and each time Hilda carried snowy linen, hoping to win the grandmother. But the old lady was firm, and "Pervyse" was to thrive, looking all the redder, inside blue calico. The mother was a good mother, sweet and constant. Very slowly, the nurses won her confidence and the grandmother's respect.

"Do come away," urged Hilda. "Let me take you all back to La Panne, where it is safer. Give 'Pervyse' his chance. It is senseless to live here in this shed under shell fire. Some day, the guns will get you, and then it will be too late."

But always they refused, mother, and brother, and big and little sister, and grandmother. The village was their place. The shed was their home.

Hilda brought her beautiful big ambulance to their door. There was room enough inside for them all to go together, with their bundles of household goods. And the mother smiled, saying:

"The shells will spare me. They will not hurt me."

"You refuse me to-day," replied Hilda, "but to-morrow I shall come again to take you away. I will take you to a new, safe home."

* * * * *

Very early the next morning, Hilda heard the sick crumble that meant the crunching of one more dwelling. She hurried to the door, and looked down the road. The place of the new birth had tumbled, and a thick smoke was rising from the wreck. She ran faster than she had ever run for her own safety. She came to the little home in a ruin of plaster and glass and brick-dust. Destruction, long overdue, had fallen out of the sunny blue sky on the group of reckless survivors in that doomed village. The soldiers were searching in the smoking litter for bodies. Big sister and little sister and brother were dead, and the little old grandmother. The mother, with shell wounds at her nursing breasts, was dying. Only "Pervyse" was living and to live. By a miracle of selection, he lay in the wreck of his house and the grave of his people—one foot half off, but otherwise a survivor of the shell that had fallen and burst inside his home.

Swiftly Hilda in her car, carried mother and child to La Panne to the great military hospital. The mother died in two hours on the operating table, and "Pervyse" was alone in a world at war.

The story and fame of him spread through the last city left to the Belgians. All the rest of their good land was trampled by the alien and marred by shell-fire and petrol. Here, alone in Flanders, there was still music in the streets, even if it was often a dead march. And here life was still normal and orderly. "Pervyse" found shelter in the military hospital where his mother had come only to die. He was the youngest wounded Belgian in all the wards. They put him in a private room with a famous English Colonel, and they called the two "Big Tom" and "Little Tom." The blue calico was changed for white things and "Pervyse" had a deep, soft cradle and more visitors than he cared to see.

* * * * *

The days of his danger and flight were evil days in Pervyse, for the guns grew busier and more deadly. There came a last day for the famous little dressing-station of the women. It began with trouble at the trenches. Two boys of nineteen years were brought in to the nurses. One of them was carrying the brains of a dead comrade on his pocket. A shell had burst in their trench, giving them head wounds. They died in the hall. They had served two days at the front. The women placed them on stretchers in the kitchen, and covered their faces, and left them in peace. A brief peace, for a shell found the kitchen, and the blue fumes of it puffed into the room where the women were sitting. The orderly and four soldier friends came running in, holding their eyes. When Hilda entered the kitchen, she saw that the shell had hit just above those quiet bodies, bringing the rafters and glass and brick upon them. A beam, from the rafter, had been driven into the breast of one of the boys—transfixing him as if by a lance. Shells were breaking in the road, the garden, the field and the near-by houses, every five seconds. In her own house, bricks were strewn about, and the windows smashed in. A large hole, in a shed back of the house, marked the flight of a shell, and behind it lay a dead man who had taken refuge there.

A Belgian had driven up their car a moment before and it was standing at the door. One soldier started to the car—a shell drove him back—a second dash and he made it, turned the car, and the women darted in. They sped down the road to the edge of the village, and here the nurses found shelter. Later that day the Colonel handed them a written order to evacuate Pervyse, lent them men to help, and gave them twenty minutes in which to pack and depart. They returned to their smashed house, and piled out their household goods. They left in the ambulance with all the soldiers cheering them. They were a sad little lot. So the loyal four months of service were ended under a few hours of gun-fire, and Hilda and her friends had to follow "Pervyse" to his new home.

As she went down the road, she took one last look at the shattered place. No house in her earthly history had concentrated so many memories. There she had put off the care-free girl, and achieved her womanhood, as if at a stroke. There she and her friends had healed a thousand soldiers. They had welcomed the Queen, princes, generals, brave officers soon to die, famous artists under arms, laughing peasant soldiers, the great and the obscure, such a society gathered under the vast pressure of a world-war as had seldom graced the "At-Homes" of an Iowa girl. There she had won fame, and a dearer thing yet, honor, which needs not to be known in order to shed its lonely comfort. She was leaving it all, forever, in that heap of plaster and crumbling brick.

* * * * *

She had rarely had him out of mind since that experience in Wetteren Convent, when they two had visited the little girl who lay dying of her bayonet wounds. But it was a full five months since she had seen him.

"I had to come back," said Hinchcliffe; "New York seemed out of it. I know there is work for me here—some little thing I can do to help you all.

"What luck?" he added.

"A shell has been following me around," replied Hilda. "So far, it has aways called too late, or missed me by a few feet of masonry. But it's on my trail. It took the windows out of my room at a doctor's house in Furnes. Later on, it went clean through my little room up over a tailor's shop. In Pervyse we had our Poste de Secours in the Burgomaster's house. One morning we had stepped out for a little air—we were a couple of hundred yards down the road—when a big shell broke in the house. And now our last home in Pervyse is blown to pieces. Luck is good to me."

Hinchcliffe took his place, and a strong place it was, in the strange life of La Panne. A word from him smoothed out tangles. The Etat Major approved of him. He was twice arrested as a spy, and enjoyed the experience hugely. At one time, there was a deficiency of tires of the right make, and he put a rush order clear across the Atlantic and had the consignment over in record time. He cut through the red tape of the transport service, red tape that had been annoying even the established hospitals. He imported comforts for the helpers. There was a special brand of tea which the English nurses were missing. So there was nothing for it, but his London agent must accompany the lot in person to La Panne. There was something restless, consuming, in his activity.

"Your maternity hospital is a great idea," said Hinchcliffe to Hilda, during one of their talks. "I've cabled for five thousand pounds. That will start things."

The maternity hospital had been suggested to Hilda by the plight of little "Pervyse," and the hundreds of other babies of the war whom she had seen, and the hapless peasant mothers. Military hospitals are for soldiers, not for expectant mothers or orphaned children, and "Pervyse's" days of glory were ending. Reluctantly Colonel Depage, head surgeon of the hospital, had told Hilda that "Pervyse" must seek another home. His room was needed for fighting men.

"Let me have him christened first?" asked Hilda, and the great Belgian physician had consented.

It took her a week to make ready the ritual, but the morning came at last.

"To-day we christen 'Pervyse,'" said Hilda to the banker. "Will you come?"

"It isn't just my sort of speciality," replied Hinchcliffe, "but of course I'll come, if you'll show me the moves."

Hilda had chosen for the ceremony a village church on the Dixmude road. They put all the little necessary bundles of baby life into Hilda's ambulance—a packet of little shawls, and intimate clothing, a basket of things to eat, a great christening cake, frosted by Dunkirk's leading confectioner, a can of chocolate and of cream, candy baskets of sweets. It was Sunday—a cloudless, innocent day. They dodged through Furnes, the ruined, and came at length to the village of their quest. They entered the convent, and found a neat, clean room of eight beds. Two babies had arrived. Six mothers were expectant. In charge of the room was a red-cheeked, black-eyed nurse, a Flemish girl, motherly with the babies. Hilda dressed "Pervyse" in a long, white, immaculate dress, and a gossamer shawl, and pinned upon him a gold pin. She set the table in the convent—the cake in the center of the table, with one candle, and snowy blossoms from a plum tree.

Then the party started for the church: fifteen-year-old Rene, the Belgian boy scout who was to serve as godfather, giggling; the apple-cheeked Flemish girl carrying "Pervyse"; Hilda and Hinchcliffe closely following. They walked through the village street past laughing soldiers who called out, "Les Anglais!" They entered the church through the left door. A puff of damp air blew into their faces. In the chancel stood a stack of soldiers' bicycles. They kneeled and waited for the Cure. In the nave, old peasant women were nodding and dipping, and telling their beads. The nurse handed the baby to Hilda. Rene giggled. Three small children wandered near and stared. On the right side of the church was heaped a bundle of straw, and three rosy soldiers emerged who had been sleeping there. They winked at the pretty Flemish nurse. The church for them was a resting-place, between trench service.

The old Cure entered with his young assistant. The youth was dudish, with a business suit, and a very high, straight collar that struck his chin. The Cure was in long, black robes, with skirts—a yellow man, gray-haired, his mouth a thin, straight slit, almost toothless. His eyebrows turned up, as if the face were being pulled. His heavy ears lay back against his head, large wads of cotton-wool in them. He talked with the nurse, inquiring for the baby's name. There were a half-dozen names for the mite—family names of father and mother, so that there might be a survival of lines once so numerous. Rene's name, too, was affixed. The Cure wrote the names down on a slip of paper, and inserted it in his prayer-book. The service proceeded in Latin and Flemish.

Then "Pervyse" was carried, behind the bicycles, to a small room, with the font. Holy water was poured into a bowl. The old priest, muttering, put his thumb into the water, and then behind each ear of the baby, and at the nape of the neck. At the touch on the neck "Pervyse" howled. The priest's hand shook, so that he jabbed the wrong place, and repeated the stroke. Then the thumb was dipped again, and crossed on the forehead, then touched on the nose and eyes and chin. Between the dippings, the aged man read from his book, and the assistant responded. To Hinchcliffe, standing at a little distance, the group made a strange picture—"Pervyse" wriggling and sometimes weeping; Hilda "Shsh, Shysh, Shshing"; Rene nudging the Flemish girl, and giggling; the soldiers peeping from the straw; the children, attracted by the outcries of "Pervyse," drawing closer; aged worshippers continuing their droning. "Pervyse" was held directly over the bowl and the slightly warmed water descended on him in volume. At this he shouted with anger. His head was dried and his white hood clapped on. He was borne to another room where from a cupboard the Cure took down the sacred pictures, and put them over the child's neck. Rene sat on the small stove in the corner of the room, and it caved in with a clatter of iron. But no side-issue could mar the ceremony which was now complete. "Pervyse" had a name and a religion.

Then it was back again to the convent for the cake, inviting the good old Cure to be one of the christening party. "Pervyse," his hand guided, cut the christening cake. The candle was lighted.

As the christening party sped homeward to La Panne, Hilda looked back. High overhead on the tower of the church, two soldiers and two officers with field glasses were stationed, signalling to their field battery.

* * * * *

Without a mishap, they had returned to the military hospital, and "Pervyse," thoroughly awakened by the ceremony, had been restored to his white crib. To soften his mood, his bottle of supper had been handed to him a little ahead of time. But, unwilling to lay aside the prominence which had been his, all day, he brandished the bottle as if it were a weapon instead of a soporific.

"A pretty little service," said Hilda, "but there was something pathetic to it. The little kid looked so lonely in the damp old church. And no one there that really belonged to him. And to-morrow or the next day or some day, they'll get the range of this place, and then little 'Pervyse' will join his mother and his brother and sisters. With us older ones, it doesn't so much matter. We've had our bit of walk and talk and so good-by. But with a child it's different. All that love and pain for nothing. One more false start."

"By God, no!" said Hinchcliffe. "'Pervyse' shall have his chance, the best chance a kid ever had. I've got to get back to America. There'll be a smash if I don't. I'm a month late on the job, as it is. But 'Pervyse' goes with me. Little Belgium is going to get his chance."

"You mean—" said Hilda.

"Certainly, I do," replied the banker. "I mean that we're going to bring that kid up as good as if war was a dream. We're going to make him glad he's alive. He's going back to America with me. Will you come?"

"Why," said Hilda, her eyes filling, "what do you mean?"

"I mean that I need you. Show me how to put this thing, that we've been doing here, into New York. It's a different world after the war. You have often said it. America mustn't be behind. I want to catch up with these Red Cross chauffeurs. I want our crowd in Wall Street to be in on the fun. Come on and help."

"I don't know what to say," began Hilda. "I shall miss you so. The boys in the ward will miss you, the babies will miss you." She laughed. "I can't come just now. There is so much work, and worse ahead."

"Later, you will come?" he pleaded. He turned to the child who was wielding his bottle as a hammer on the foot of the bed, and lifted him shoulder high.

"Remember," he said, as the bottle was thumped on his head, "'Pervyse' and I will be waiting."

The bottle fell on the floor, and the outraged glass splintered, and "Pervyse's" supper went trickling down the cracks.

"You see," said the banker, "we are helpless without you."



* * * * *



Transcriber's note:

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and inconsistent hyphenation. Obvious typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the like) have been corrected. Corrections [in brackets] in the text are noted below:

page 49: added quote

of it," objected Barkleigh. ["]When the danger is so close you can see it,

page 63: typo corrected

inch. So the little houshold[household] had removed themselves from the famous cellar

page 164: typo corrected

But no indignity of the roadway can long withold[withhold] him from his portion of peace, and

page 185: typo corrected

its utmost, and a partial unconsciousnes[unconsciousness] was spreading over troubled

THE END