The Red Cross Barge Part 10

Why was the Tournebride thus deserted? Officers, as well as the men who had drunk the wine from the bottles now lying empty and broken about his feet, had been here very lately, for on a wooden table standing in the middle of the courtyard were a dozen or more large gla.s.s goblets--one even now half full of white wine--and empty, gold-foiled bottles. There also, on this wooden table, lay the bunch of keys which always dangled at Madame Blanc's ample waist.

Madame Blanc? Yes, if, as now seemed to be the case, the Commandant and his staff were all out in the town, he could leave Mademoiselle Rouannes with her while he went to look for them. In that thought he found a measure of relief. The knowledge that Jeanne Rouannes would have to run the gauntlet of the Prussian officers' eyes had been hateful to him.

But where was Madame Blanc?

Calling out her name, he walked across to the half-open door of the kitchen; and then, suddenly, Jeanne Rouannes, hardened as she had become that day to dreadful sights and sounds, uttered a low exclamation of fear and surprise. 'Great G.o.d!' she exclaimed in French, 'what is that?

What is that, down there?'

The Herr Doktor peered towards the place where she was staring, and with eyes which gradually filled with pain and horror, he saw that a thin stream of blood was oozing sluggishly through the doorway where he had stood so often talking to the Frenchwoman, with whom, at last, he had become good friends.

He stumbled forward, full of a dreadful foreboding, and tried to push back the door. But it would only swing forward.

Waving the girl back with a sharp, quick gesture, he pressed through the aperture, and then he, too, uttered an exclamation, a hoa.r.s.e guttural cry of distress, for just behind the door, huddled up on the floor of her kitchen, lay the dead body of Madame Blanc.

The landlady of the Tournebride had been shot half a dozen times, at close range, in the breast, not struck--as the German surgeon for a brief moment had supposed and hoped--by a stray fragment of sh.e.l.l.

'Ach!' he muttered under his teeth, 'this is bad--very bad!' But Jeanne Rouannes, now standing just behind him, remained silent. She looked as if the tears had frozen on her face, and of the two she was the more composed, as, in silence, they dragged the dead woman a little further into the kitchen, and tried to arrange her poor, fat body into some semblance of decent death.

At last, having done the little they could, they came out again into the suns.h.i.+ne, and crossed once more the courtyard of the ownerless Tournebride. And still, of the two, it was the man who looked, and perchance felt, the more affected. In his companion all sensation seemed dulled, and as they walked along, perforce traversing many painful scenes--for they had now re-entered the zone of looting and disorder--she seemed really unconscious of what was going on about her.

Not till they had wandered for a long way, hither and thither, did they find the headquarters of the Commandant established in the Mairie. It was there that the Herr Doktor listened, with a rush of impotent anger, to the curt intimation that the French Red Cross nurse, instead of receiving a pa.s.s out of Valoise, must proceed at once to the German Field Ambulance which was already at work in the church hard by.

PART IV

1

Still draped in the black-and-silver trappings laboriously hung by the women of Valoise to do funeral honour to Dr. Rouannes, the parish church, when Jeanne Rouannes entered it, was already transformed into a hospital ward; and, as she came slowly back to normal conditions of heart and brain, she was amazed to see all that these capable, if rough-looking, German medical orderlies had accomplished.

Not only had every kind of bed already been commandeered from the houses round, but through medieval gla.s.s which the Great Revolution had spared, the sun shone on huge cases containing every kind of surgical requisite ready for immediate use.

An operating theatre equipment had been set out in the Lady Chapel, and a wave of colour flooded the French girl's face when she saw that the trestles on which her father's rude coffin had rested were now serving as the base of the princ.i.p.al operating table. She could not help wondering in her ignorance why all these elaborate preparations had been made, for the only wounded occupant of this strange war-hospital was a two-year-old girl, injured in the head by a fragment of one of the half-dozen sh.e.l.ls which had fallen in the town two hours before.

'To the little child attend you,' the Herr Doktor muttered in her ear.

'I will ensure that no disagreeables you befall. The Herr Stabsarzt is a good man--perhaps have you of him heard, my gracious miss; he is the surgeon Octavius Mott of Ems. Very famous and skilful is he.'

Quickly, and yet with much ceremony, he brought her up to the big, s.h.a.ggy, spectacled German, who greeted her courteously with the words, uttered in a French as good as her own, 'We shall have plenty of work for you presently, Mademoiselle.'

Then, as Max Keller, in a quick, rather anxious undertone, explained that Mademoiselle Rouannes was the just orphaned daughter of a French Red Cross doctor, the Herr Stabsarzt became perceptibly more cordial.

'She does not look strong enough for the labours which will presently begin. You must watch over the poor bereaved one,' he said kindly; 'she looks a truly refined, gentle being, as well as full of French prettiness and grace. There are plenty of ugly old women in this town whom we shall be able to make useful when the wounded come in.'

The Herr Doktor's face became transformed. He could have knelt and kissed the hand of the great, the skilful, the so understanding and humane Octavius Mott! The Herr Stabsarzt, looking at him from out his shrewd little eyes, saw something in the plain sensitive face that touched him. 'So?' he said to himself, 'there is already an excellent Franco-German alliance established here!'

The soldier looters of Valoise slept heavily that night. Their miserable victims, those among them who had not fled into the surrounding country, crowded back into their ravished, empty houses, and into those out-buildings and stables which had escaped the notice of the marauders--anywhere to be free of hateful and terrifying presences. They hoped, poor wretches, with that curious hope and faith in the future, which in the French temperament survives all material disasters, and makes recuperation comparatively easy, that with the morning the enemy would hasten away from the sacked town. This, as they all knew, was what had happened elsewhere.

But, with the breaking of the cloudless dawn, came a new terror to the unhappy people, for sh.e.l.ls again began dropping into the town, and, for a while at least, panic and confusion reigned, even among the sated German soldiery. The French batteries, hidden away to the right of Valoise, had evidently obtained trustworthy information from within the town, for their attack was carefully directed to the group of villas on the hill where the officers had established themselves, but the church,--the church which now flew the Red Cross flag, and was still the glory of Valoise, was spared.

At last the French guns found another range, that of the German batteries, and as these replied, so strange and so exciting was the artillery duel, that women, and even children, crowded into the streets and, with upturned faces, watched the sh.e.l.ls from the even then famous '75, and the heavier German missiles, go hurtling by overhead.

And then very soon, from the plains below and the woods above Valoise, the wounded came pouring in. They were brought in every kind of vehicle, from the luxurious motor ambulances belonging to the German Red Cross, to handcarts drawn by donkeys and by dogs.

At the end of the first hour, Jeanne Rouannes told herself that there was no room for more. But on and on they came, in a terrible, continuous procession, and place still had to be found for them. After the beds had all been filled, the stone floor, hastily covered with stacks of straw, had to serve as resting-place for many more. Very soon, too, all the houses, and the often more comfortable stables and out-buildings of the town, were also full and overfull....

The French Red Cross nurse was ordered to remain in the church, and reluctantly she found herself compelled to admire the energy, the method, the quick, if to her heartless, type of efficient intelligence, the German surgeons there brought to their terrible tasks. In whatever part of the church she happened to be, whatever the duty in which she was engaged, during those hours of horror and strain, when all the miraculous resources of youth--her fine health of body, and finer stoicism of soul--alone brought her through the awful ordeal, the Herr Doktor watched over, and as far as was in his power, helped her to perform her arduous, pitiful works of mercy.

Very soon--so soon that it seemed retrospectively to have been at the end of the first morning--everything a normal surgeon and his dressers require had been used up, and that though, by the forethought of Herr Doktor Max Keller, all the clean, looted linen which had been put safely away for transport to Germany had early been requisitioned by the Field Ambulance.

The German wounded far outnumbered the French, and at first the fact had filled the French Red Cross nurse with a relief of which she felt ashamed.

Then suddenly she understood the strange disparity! To these keen, clear-thinking German surgeons their own countrymen came first as a matter of course, and the best was naturally reserved for them. They were skilful, and as humane as it was in them to be, to all those whom they attended, but the grey-clad wounded were obviously the most important.

The knowledge that this was so filled Jeanne Rouannes with revolt, and bitter anger. As she half mechanically performed the duties set her, she thought of her own shattered countrymen, lying for the most part outside and unattended; and she was filled with repugnance, even horror, for all these Germans, both the wounded and the whole, who lay and stood about her. As far as was possible, she lavished the small surgical science she possessed, and the measureless pity and tenderness that was hers in ample measure, on the few French wounded who were brought into the church.

Then suddenly a strange thing happened. A dying German, to whom she had just given an injection of camphorated oil, held out his hand, gropingly. She took the rough, blackened hand in hers, and he murmured 'Mutter,' in a voice full of agonised longing and entreaty. From that moment Jeanne Rouannes no longer made, even in her inmost heart, any distinction between the French and German wounded. She tended them as far as was in her power, and in the measure of her strength, with the same kindness and untiring devotion.

In addition to the wounded--the wounded brought in from the scenes of the fierce rearguard actions now being fought round Valoise--were the injured townspeople, the old women and the little children who became unwitting targets for the bombs, the sh.e.l.ls, and even the arrows, which now and again fell from the German aeroplanes circling in the air above.

Occasionally, not often, the French Red Cross nurse would obtain permission to go out into the town to attend on some of them; and perhaps because the thought of any personal danger was so far from them both, during those strange and terrible days, the Herr Doktor Max Keller and Jeanne Rouannes, when engaged on such outside works of mercy, met with none of the mishaps which befell many of those about them.

Such trifling, even childish, incidents and happenings remained imprinted on her heart! Thus, she was shaken with rage and disgust when shown that the curiously shaped steel arrow which had fatally injured a little child, had fastened to it, not only a miniature German flag, but an absurd message, written in bad French, pinned to the flag.

As to the sights which filled her eyes when she was away from the shadowed church, the one which remained the most vividly present to her, in after days, was the effect produced by a fragment of sh.e.l.l which happened to unseal the top of a hydrant. Just out of reach of a fiercely burning building, the water rose like a colossal fountain, throwing exquisite sprays of prismatic colour into the sunny air.

All through those four September days, while friend and enemy destroyed the Haute Ville of Valoise, the sun shone hotly in a clear sky, the air was filled with a soft, luminous haze which rose from the river, and the fierce fighting in the woods behind the town went on in glades and coverts filled with the magic beauty of early autumn scents and tints.

2

Jeanne Rouannes suddenly awoke from what had been a seven hours' deep, death-like sleep. Awoke? Ah no! As she sat up in a darkness broken by tiny, wraithlike shafts of sunlight, she half smiled, half frowned at the strangeness of the nightmare in the mazes of which she found herself involved.

Instead of being in her blue-and-white room at home, surrounded by all her girlish treasures, and lying in the old-fas.h.i.+oned mahogany bed, opposite which hung a charming portrait, painted some thirty years ago, of her gentle, dead mother, she seemed to be--of all the most absurdly improbable places--in the sacristy of the parish church, and sitting up, fully dressed, on a heap of dirty grey coats!

There came over her a sudden misgiving--a mysterious sinking of the heart. Perhaps this was the beginning of illness--of a very serious, terrible illness? She was conscious of agonising, shooting pain in her head, and over her eyes, also of dull, aching sensations in her limbs, especially in her arms.... But if only she could shake herself free of this evil nightmare, she would not mind the pain....

Then there seemed to steal into her delicate nostrils a most horrible odour--And it was that now dreadfully familiar smell, that sweetish, sickly, penetrating smell, which brought back full consciousness to Jeanne Rouannes.

This was no dream--no nightmare. She was in very truth lying, or rather now sitting up, in the sacristy of the old church! It was there that the Herr Doktor had arranged her rude couch the night before; he, too, who had folded one of her blood-stained Red Cross overalls to make a pillow for her head, and, finally, with the thoughtful kindness on which she had grown unconsciously to rely, darkened the two narrow windows with various holy vestments which he had unceremoniously pulled out of M. le Cure's cupboard. She even remembered, now, the form of English words in which, with a queer break in his tired, worn voice, he had _ordered_ her to lie down and sleep.

He had done it all for the best--she knew that. And yet, and yet she was faintly resentful of his well-meant care. For now she was uneasily conscious that she felt less able than she had felt yesterday to go on with her work--the terrible, urgent, unceasing work which lay just the other side of the oak door leading into the church.

Through that door there now came the loud sounds of knocking which had evidently awakened her. Each knock reverberated horribly in her brain.

The Herr Doktor would be sorry--concern would fill his anxious, red-rimmed eyes, when he saw how tired, how dreadfully tired, in spite of her long night's rest, poor Jeanne now was!