The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me Part 4

"Oh, yes," answered the Eager Soul to our enquiring eyes. "Mrs.

Chesman--this is practically her hospital. I mean she and her group are keeping it equipped and going--a wonderful work. I mean here is a real thing for a woman to do. And, oh, the need of it!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Oh, yes," answered the Eager Soul to our enquiring eyes. "Mrs. Chessman--this is practically her hospital"]

"Nice sort?" This from Henry, observing that there was no move toward us, on the part of the Gilded Youth and Auntie. Henry may have had his theory for their splendid isolation. But it received no stimulus when the Eager Soul answered:

"Oh, yes, I believe so. I haven't met her yet. They all say she is charming." Henry looked at me. She caught the glance. Then to cover his tracks he grinned and said: "Charm seems to run in their family."

"Yes," she returned amiably. "One meets so many nice people on the boat."

And Henry, still in pursuit of useful social information, insisted: "Well, are they as nice in the war zone as they are--on the boat?"

We got our first dimple then, and the Eager Soul tucked in a wisp of red hair, as she answered: "Well, really, I've been too busy to know." She turned absent-mindedly toward the figure of the Gilded Youth, across the court. But the dimples and the smile faded and she closed the door firmly and finally on romance, when she said: "On the record of service shown by my entrance card, they have made me a.s.sistant to the new head nurse who is coming over from Souilly to-night."

After we had told her that we were going to American headquarters soon, she smiled again, to show us that she knew that when we went probably we would see the Young Doctor. But she let the smile stand as her only response to Henry's suggestion of a message. In another moment she turned to her work.

"Well," said Henry, "some pride! 'One meets so many nice people on the boat!' The idea being that her outfit at home is just as good as Auntie's group in New York, even if he didn't introduce her!

You know I rather like the social s.p.u.n.k of our Great Middle West!"

While we were talking the Gilded Youth began moving Auntie slowly but rather directly around the court to us. It occurred to me that perhaps he realized that we were the only social G.o.dfathers that the Eager Soul had in Europe, and that if he introduced us to Auntie it would be an indication that the affair of the boat, if it was an affair, was to be put upon a social basis! And in two minutes more he had docked Auntie at our pier. A large, brusk, well-groomed, good-looking woman of fifty was Auntie. Her Winthrop and Endicott blood advertised itself in her Bostonese, but she was sound and strong and the way she instantly got at the invoice price of Henry and his real worth, pleased me. She was genuine American. The thing that troubled me was the fear that Henry would begin too soon to lambast onion soup. But he didn't and in a few moments we were having this dialogue:

HENRY: "Oh, yes, indeed; we've grown fond of her. Her father was--"

AUNTIE: "Oh, yes, I knew her father. Mr. Chesman and he were interested together in New Mexican mining claims in the eighties; I believe they made some money. But--"

THE GILDED YOUTH: "Well, Auntie--would you mind telling me how--?"

AUNTIE: "Why, on her application blank, of course, with her father's name, age and residence."

THE GILDED ONE: "But you never mentioned it to me?"

AUNTIE: "Nor to her, either. Why should I? This is hardly the place to organize the Colonial Dames! I believe you said a few minutes ago that you had met her on the boat."

HENRY: "One meets so many nice people on the boat!"

ME: "You've heard of the woman who said she didn't know the man socially, she had just met him coming over on the boat!"

The Gilded Youth looked quickly at me, catching me suppressing a wink at Henry, who grinned at the expiring ghost of it. Then Auntie led the talk to the raid of the night before; and invited us to come up for a night's sleep in a civilized bed in the hospital. We were quartered for the night with the Ambulance boys, sleeping in a barn loft, so naturally, we accepted her invitation. Just as we were leaving to get our baggage, out into the court came the Eager Soul bearing a letter. We did not see the address, but it was, alas, plainly dimpled in her face, for the Gilded Youth to see, and after greeting him only pleasantly, she handed the letter to us, saying: "Would you be good enough to deliver this for me at Gonrecourt next week, as you are pa.s.sing? It is to a friend I met on the boat!"

"Yes," said Henry; "one meets so many nice people on the boat."

"Sometimes," she answered, as she turned to her work.

That night we slept like logs until after midnight; then the moon rose, and the hospital began to come to life. The stir and murmur of the place wakened us. And we realized what a moonlight night means in a hospital near the front line. It means terror. No one slept after moonrise. It was a new experience for Henry and me.

So we rose and met it. And we realized that in scores of hospitals all over the war zone, on the side of the allies, similar scenes were enacting. The Germans were literally tearing the nerves out of hundreds of nurses by their raiding campaign--nurses whom the raiders did not visit, but who were threatened by every moonlight night!

It must have been after two in the morning, when we saw the Eager Soul and the Gilded Youth walking around the court as they used to pace the deck together. Once or twice they pa.s.sed our window, and we heard their voices. They were having some sort of a tall talk on philosophical matters, which annoyed Henry. The ocean and onion soup and philosophical theorizing never seemed reasonable, normal expressions of anything properly in the cosmos to Henry; he professed to believe that persons who tolerated these things would sooner or later be caught using the words "group" and "reaction" and "hypothesis," and he would have none of them. But for all that she used the word group and once confessed that she was a subscriber to the New Republic, Henry did like the Eager Soul; so he waked me up from a doze to say: "Bill, she's putting him through the eye of the needle all right. And he's sliding through slick as goose-grease. I heard him telling her a minute ago that the war isn't for boundaries and geography; but for a restatement of human creeds. Then she said that steam and electricity have over-capitalized the world; that we are paying too highly for superintendence and that the price of superintendence must come down, and wages must come up. Then he said that he and his cla.s.s will go in the fires burning out there--melted like wax. And she told him that they both had a lot of stolen goods on them--bodies and minds, and hearts cultivated at the expense of their fellow creatures whose lives had been narrowed that theirs might be broadened. And you should have heard her talk about the Young Doctor--a self-made man, who had earned his way through college and medical school, and made his own place professionally.

She said he was the Herald of the New Day. Bill," sighed Henry, "what would you give if you could talk like that--again?" But from me, drowsily, came this: "Henry--do you suppose she will get around to that slapping tonight she promised him on the boat? That would be worth staying up to see!"

"She'll never slap him. He'll never need it. She's talked him clear out of the mood!"

"Yes, she has--yes, she has," came from me. And Henry insisted:

"She may have to slap the Doctor; but she has steered this boy out of the danger zone into the open sea of friends.h.i.+p."

"Oh, yes, she has; oh, yes, she has," came the echo from the other bed! And Henry subsided.

But the buzzing about the hospital would not let us sleep. At three o'clock evidently they were serving tea to the nurses, or lunch of some kind. The moon was s.h.i.+ning straight down into the court; the Gilded Youth and the Eager Soul had gone in, and another couple, a stenographer and a hospital orderly were using it as a parlour.

"Queer, queer business, this love-making under the rustle of the wings of death," said Henry. A French plane flying across had filled the compound for a moment. But everyone soon recognized its peculiar buzz. Then for a few seconds from afar came the low ominous hum of the German planes. But they circled away from us. Perhaps the French drove them back. However, it was the excitement in the court that caused Henry's remark. For the young people did not deflect their monotonous course about the compound, when the sky-gazers had returned indoors. Around and around they went, talking, talking, talking, with the low insistent murmur of deeply interested people.

Their nerves were taut; emotion was raw; they were young, and their blood moved riotously. And there was the moon, the moon that, since man could turn his face upward, has been the symbol of the thing called love. And now all over that long line slashed across the face of Europe, the moon is the herald of death. Men see it rise in terror, for they know that the season of the moon is the season of slaughter. Yet there they walked in the hospital yard, two unknown lovers, who were true to the moon.

Henry's next remark was: "Bill, fancy when you were young doing your courting out there where a sh.e.l.l is liable to wipe you out any second. We at least had the advantage of elm trees to protect us from the shafts of death."

"Do you suppose, Henry," answered his friend, "that they miss the drip of oars, the shade of the overhanging willows, the suggestive whisper of waters frisking over the ripples at the ford? How can they make love in such a place?"

"'Gold,'" replied Henry, quoting from Solomon, who was wise, "'is where you find it!'" Then we heard the insistence of the lovers'

babble drawing near us again. As they turned a corner, Henry heaved a sigh at the perversity of youth in the flaunting neglect of sleep and death, which ever are vital to middle years. We both looked out to the white courtyard, heard the snarl of another plane, obviously French, but still disconcerting, saw the slow even pace of the lovers, unaffected by the approaching growl of the plane, and it came to me to quote one wiser even than Solomon: "O death, where is thy sting!"

We took but a cat-nap that night, and in the morning set down the score on our love affair. The record indicates that during the day Henry had lost; during the night he had won. He put it down in his black book against the time when we should get to Paris, where money would buy things. For we ate at camps, slept in hospitals or in barns or in mess rooms of the ambulance men, and day by day and night after night we saw much misery and were "acquainted with grief." There are so many kinds of hospitals in France! The great streams of broken men that flow unceasingly down from the front are divided as they reach the base hospitals and field hospitals into scores of smaller currents, each flowing to a separate place, where specialists treat the various cases. The blind go one way; those dumb with sh.e.l.l-shock go another; jaw cases separate from men with scalp wounds, and hip fractures are divided from shoulder fractures as the sheep from the goats. Travelling about among the hospitals one picks up curious unrelated and unexplained bits of information; as, for instance, that the British Tommy is the most patient man in Europe under pain. He likes to distinguish between himself and his wound and is likely to reply to the doctor any fine morning, "Me? Oh, I'm right at the top form, Sir; but my leg is bothering me a bit, Sir!" The Canadian isn't so game under a roof as he is under the open sky and in the charge. And the American grunts more than he should. But here is a queer thing. The French tubercular soldier is despondent. With Americans, tuberculosis breeds hope.

Perhaps it is the buoyancy of the young blood of our country; but no American feels he is ever going to die with tuberculosis. He feels he is. .h.i.t hard; that it may take six months or a year to get on his feet; after that--he goes on dreaming his dream. But the tubercular French soldiers are the saddest looking men in Europe.

Back in Kansas last spring we had heard a story to the effect that the Germans were inoculating the French and Belgians behind the lines of the allies with tubercular bacteria. We asked French and American and British doctors about that story, and they all answered that there was nothing to it. The doctors told us that the Germans have a cheaper and better way to fill France with tuberculosis than by wasting serum on their enemies. And then, one day in a tuberculosis hospital we picked up this story, which explained what the doctors meant.

We met a young man from Lille. It was his birthday; Henry bought him a bouquet. He told us his story. He said:

"Three years ago when the war broke out I was 19 years old and was living in Lille with my parents. The Germans came to our house one day with their guns and took me away. They took me to a town in Germany; I think it was Essen, where they made me work in an iron or steel mill. I worked fourteen hours a day, slept on straw outside the works in a shed, had only the clothes they took me in and had only bran to eat!"

"Only bran?" we asked, doubting it.

"Only bran," the interpreter repeated, and from half a dozen cots near by, where others who had suffered as he had, heard our question, came the echo of his confirmation, "Only bran to eat!"

He soon caught cold, and soon the "cold" became tuberculosis, and after three years of this his sick days exceeded his work days, and in due course he and five hundred others were a.s.sembled, put on a train and s.h.i.+pped out of Germany through Switzerland to Evian in France. Three hundred thousand of these poor husks, men, women, and children, have been dumped into France in the last seven months.

Two trainloads of them arrive at Evian every day. The men and women, mostly tubercular, do not tarry. They push on into France, a deadly white stream.

In time the week ended that marked our first trip to the French front. During that week we lived almost entirely in the war zone, and under war conditions. The food was good--better than good, it was excellent, but not plentiful, and the beds were clean and full of sleep. The only physical discomfort we found was in the lack of drinking water. We were warned against all local water.

My feelings on the subject of the French coffee and milk were something like Henry's antipathy to onion soup. But we both loved water with our meals. We had been vaccinated against typhoid, and we were rather insistent that we could drink any kind of water, if it was reasonably clean. But men said "this country is no place to drink water. It has been a battle-ground and a cemetery for three years." Still we insisted, and then, Mr. Norton, head of the American ambulance, told us this one: "Out behind a barrage once near the Champagne; helping the stretcher bearers; nasty weather, rain, and cold. But there we were. We couldn't get in. We ducked from sh.e.l.l hole to sh.e.l.l hole. Finally I found a nice deep one, with water in the bottom--oh, maybe five feet of water in a fifteen foot hole, and I stayed there; two days and nights. My canteen went dry, and for a day or two I scooped water out of the sh.e.l.l hole and drank it. Good enough tasting water so far as that goes, and fresh too!

But at the end of the third day, I decided it wasn't agreeing with me and quit."

"Why?" we asked. "Did you leave the sh.e.l.l hole?"

"No--oh, no. It was a good sh.e.l.l hole. I stayed. But you know Fritzie came up!" he answered.

So our taste for water with our meals, which is America's choicest privilege, pa.s.sed. Henry could drink the coffee, but it didn't taste good to me. The brackish red wine they served with the army ration tasted like diluted vinegar and looked like pokeberry ink.

It seemed only good to put in our fountain pens. A tablespoonful would last me all day. Our week's trip ended at Monter-en-Der, where there was a hotel and an Ambulance corps unit that had been over to visit the American troops and had brought back from the commissary department much loot. Among other things was water--bottled water, pure unfermented water. And when we sat at table they brought me a bottle.

Try going seven days on pokeberry ink and boiled coffee yourself and note the reaction. Your veins will be dry; your stomach will crackle as it grinds the food. The water in that bottle, a quart bottle, evaporated. They brought another. It disappeared. They brought a third. The waiters in the hotel were attracted by the sight. No Frenchman ever drinks water with his meals, and the spectacle of this American sousing himself with water while he ate was a rare sight. The waiters gathered in the corner to watch me. Henry saw them, and motioned toward me, and tapped his forehead. They went and brought other waiters and men from the bar. He was a rare bird; this American going on a big drunk on water. So they peered in doors, through windows and stood in the diningroom corners to watch the fourth bottle go down. And when at the end of the meal the American rose, and walked through the crowd, they made way for him. A desperate man at least commands respect, whatever his delusion may be.

And that night we left the French front, and nosed our car toward Paris.