Arthur Gleason

“ Here in this worst of the evils, this horror of war, men were manifesting a humanity, a consideration, at a higher level than she felt she had ever shown it in happy surroundings in a peaceful land. Hilda won the sense, which was to be of abiding good to her, that at last she had justified her existence. She, too, was now helping to continue that great tradition of human kindness which had made this world a more decent place to live in. No one could any longer say she was only a poor artist in an age of big things. ”

“ That richness of feeling is interwoven with a place. No passion or gladness comes out of the buried years without some bit of the soil clinging to it.
Now, in a passing autumn, for a nation of people, all places are alike to them bitter in the recollection. The Belgian, disinherited, can never summon a presence out of the past which will not, in its coming, bring burning and slaughter. ”

“ 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 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." ”

“ Bracher was just starting on one of her excursions from Pervyse into Furnes. Her tiny first-aid hospital, hidden in the battered house, needed food, clothing, and dressings for the wounded. One morning when the three nurses were up in the trenches, a shell had dug down into their cellar and spilled ruin. Now, it is not well to live in a place which a gun has located, because modern artillery is fine in its workings to a hair's-breadth, and can repeat its performance to a fractional inch. ”

“ No indemnity will cleanse his mind of the vileness committed on what he loved. By every aspect of a once-prized beauty, the face of his torment is made more clear. Of all that fills the life of memory—the secure home, the fruitful village and the well-loved land—there is no acre remaining where his thought can rest. Each remembered place brings a sharper stroke of poignancy to the mind that is dispossessed. ”

“ But death is war's [117] best gift. War's other gifts are malicious—fever and plague, and the maiming of strength, and the fouling of beauty—shapely bodies tortured to strange forms, eager young faces torn away. Death is choicer than that, a release from the horror of life trampled like a filthy weed.
"Mons was a birthday party to this," said a Tommy to Hilda. "They're expecting too much of us. The whole thing is put on us to do, and it takes a lot of doing."
Dr. McDonnell and Woffington loaded the car with the severest of the cases, and returned to the white house of the Officer. ”

“ 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." ”

“ There, in the Convent, known now as Military Hospital Number One, was row after row of Khaki men in bed. They had overflowed to the stone floor down the long corridors, hundreds of yards of length, and every foot close packed, like fish in a tin, with helpless outstretched men. The grey stones and [119] the drab suits on the bundles of straw,—what a backwash from the tides of slaughter. If a man stood on his feet, he had to reach for a cane. There were no whole men there, except the busy stretcher-bearers bringing in new tenants for the crowded smelly place. ”

“ 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."
[148]
"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. ”

“ In that deadlock of slaughter where I worked, I saw no pageantry of war, no glitter and pomp, at all. Nothing remains to me of war pictures except the bleakness. When I think suddenly of Belgium, I see a town heavy with the coming horror:—almost all the houses sealed, the curtains drawn, the friendly door barred. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [145] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why are you out here? Why isn't a hospital good enough for you, back in Furnes or Dunkirk?"
"I remember," returned Hilda. "I'll tell you. I could answer you by saying that we're out to help, and that would be true, too. But it wouldn't be quite the whole truth, for there's a tang of adventure in Pervyse, where we can see the outposts of the other fellows, that there isn't in the Carnegie Library in Pittsburg, let us say. Yes, we're out to help. But we're out for another reason, too. For generations now, you men have had a monopoly of physical courage. ”

“ At three of the tables sat officers of the Belgian regiments— [68] lieutenants, two commandants, one captain. At the fourth table, in the window, was dear little Doctor Neil McDonnell, beaming at the velocity and sensation of her advent.
"You come like a yellow peril," said he. "If you are not careful, you will make more wounded than you heal."
"Never," returned Mrs. Bracher, firmly; "it is always in control." ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the three women went to Pervyse, and the fame of them spread through the Belgian Army, the Doctor was as happy [147] 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 ”

“ 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 [151] 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. ”

“ He was neat—neat [168] 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. ”

“ Bracher's flying visits to Furnes.
"I could hardly call it hot," replied the nurse. "The walls of our house, that is, the fragments of them left standing, are full of shrapnel. The road outside our door is dented with shell holes. Every house in the village is shot full of metal. There's a battery of seven Belgian guns spitting away in our back-yard. But we don't call it hot, because we hate to exaggerate."
"I'll have to come out and see you," he said, with a smile.
He became a frequent visitor at Pervyse.
"Rollo is wonderful," exclaimed Hilda. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has found its home and its home is a ruin. Over the peaceful earth and under a silent sky, bits of destruction are travelling, projections of the human will. Where lately there was a soft outline, rising from the [114] soil as if the stones of the field had been called together by the same breath that spread the forest, now there is a heap of rock-dust. Man, infinite in faculty, has narrowed his devising to the uses of havoc. He has lifted his hand against the immortal part of himself. ”

“ Bracher, and the silent, charming Scotch. The band bashed the cymbals and beat the drum, and the wind instruments roared approval. And the modest young King saluted the two brave ladies.
In a shop door, a couple of hundred yards from the ceremony, Hilda was standing quietly watching the joyous crowds and their King. Pushing through the throng that hemmed her in, a massive man came and stood by her.
"Ah, Mr. Barkleigh," said Hilda, "this is a surprise."
"It's a shame," he began.
"What's a shame?" asked Hilda.
"Why aren't they decorating you? You're the bravest of the lot." ”

“ Cattle had been mowed down by machine guns. Heavy sows and their tiny yelping litter, were shot as they trundled about, or, surviving the far-cast invisible death, [106] were spitted for soldiers' rations. And with men, the church-yard and the fields, and even the running streams, were choked. Only birds of the air, of all the living, had remained free of their element, floating over the battling below them, as blithe as if men had not sown the lower spaces with slaughter. ”

“ Bracher.
"The lot of us here, exchanging favorites, with war just outside our window. I tell you," repeated Hilda, "no one would believe it."
"They don't have to," retorted Mrs. Bracher, sharply. She had grown weary of telling folks at home how matters stood, and then having them say, "Fancy now, really?"
The methodical guns had pounded the humanity out of Pervyse, and, with the living, had gone music and art. There was nowhere in the wasted area for the tired soldiers to find relief from their monotony. War is a dreary thing. ”