Part 37 (2/2)
Spring not only came to Flanders, but the mud dried; the fields were carpeted with the tender green of young grain, and the canopies of foliage gave better cover for the ”hows.” Green, yes, but flat that vista from the gun-positions, while the graceful slopes of the Berks.h.i.+res might be dripping and glistening as they had on the afternoon that he returned from the Southwest. Bill Hurley was at his accustomed place on the station platform, no doubt; Hanks, the druggist, was still branching out, no doubt. But Truckleford had the greater call of the two for him that day; for he had received a letter that his father and mother had at last undertaken their pilgrimage and had arrived at the vicarage, where they were waiting until he had another week's leave.
Another bit of news, too. Peter Smithers, without any warning to the War Lord, was about to visit Europe to see things for himself. Peter's only expressed view of Phil's action in going to war had been:
”About what you would expect. I gave him up long ago. So Ledyard's keeping the job for him--hm-m-m! Well, Ledyard's business isn't the sport of a lot of jockeying politicians.”
Sometimes Phil had thought what if a sh.e.l.l should take off an arm or a leg, or otherwise maim him for life. Hundreds of thousands of others had thought the same. The merciful bullet through the heart or the wound that heals leaving one whole--these are a part of the game. But that jagged, tearing piece of sh.e.l.l-fragment--this was the devil of the new psychology of war.
It was a glorious morning that he went up to the trench to take his turn at observation. The sun made the wings of the planes overhead s.h.i.+mmer with silver and gold under a fleckless sky. The birds were singing their song in the midst of the song of bullets. It hardly seemed possible that death could lurk in the soft puffs of shrapnel smoke playing around the planes. Death should have no part in such a day. It was a day of life. Soft air to breathe, gentle breezes, kindly suns.h.i.+ne, and youth. Phil enjoyed the fact of existence as some superb privilege which deserved grat.i.tude to earth and sky, and particularly to the sky, which was all that he could see as he entered the winding communication trench.
”Good-morning!”
The cheery greetings were exchanged between fellow-officers as if the game were not with death, but with racquets on an English lawn.
”They are strafing a bit up there,” said one; which meant that there was some sh.e.l.ling in the front line, where little mirrors were set up on parapets of sandbags. Through these bits of gla.s.s you could look out on a field of weeds across to another line of sandbags, Britain burrowing on one side and Germany on the other of No Man's Land. Phil took the place of another lieutenant at the O.P., or Observation Post.
Here he was in touch by telephone with his battery. He watched black bursts of smoke, which were the sh.e.l.ls from its guns, and reported their proximity to the target. It was a matter of eyesight and judgment and speaking into a black disk--nothing dramatic about it.
Since he was at Mervaux he had learned much about those bursts of black smoke. He had seen many men knocked over by them. One monster had come even closer to him than the sh.e.l.l which had exploded between him and Helen, and on that occasion he had been dug out from under a tumbled parapet with a spade. When the Germans increased their sh.e.l.l-fire on any section of the British trenches, the British increased theirs on the Germans; then, in turn, the Germans increased theirs and the British increased theirs. Thus it happened on this particular morning, perhaps because the light was good for artillery observation. He was not looking to see what the German sh.e.l.ls did to the British trench, but what his sh.e.l.ls were doing to the German trench! ”Right on!” He had announced the result of a shot when he heard the hurtling, growing scream of a nine-inch coming straight toward him.
After that the end of all sensation; oblivion, which had come to many another man from the burst of a nine-inch whether or not he ever awoke to life in this world.
After he knew not how long Phil felt some one pulling at his body, which seemed to rest under a great weight. This was all, and this only for a fleeting moment; he was uncertain whether he was in this world or the other. Then he was b.u.mped against something and felt his hand brush the hard earth. Vaguely he reasoned that stretcher-bearers were carrying him around the traverse of a trench. A hot, moist sponge seemed pressed into his throat and something besides air was coming into his lungs and he was trying to cough it out. Utter darkness encompa.s.sed him and there was no sound.
All volition, all muscular and nerve-initiative had been beaten out of him. He could only try to breathe through that hot sponge and to keep that other trickling thing out of his lungs. It was not his mind that made this effort; only a body detached from his mind, acting involuntarily like the flouncing of a fish out of water. He lost consciousness again before he realised where he was. .h.i.t; and the litter-bearers bore him on to the casualty clearing station. They did not know whether or not he was dead. Sometimes cases like that were and sometimes they were not when they reached the station.
”Better be, though,” said the one who had the rear handles of the stretcher.
”Yes. I'd want to be,” said the man in front.
CHAPTER XXVII
A SMILING HELEN
The War Office must foresee everything; that men must be drilled before they know how to fight and that when they fight some will be wounded.
There must be experts in salvage as well as in preparation; depots to mend broken parts in the immense, complicated machine.
On a hillside where they would miss none of the rare winter suns.h.i.+ne, the summer breezes, or the tonic of fresh spring air, rows of long, green barracks had risen. Gravelled paths connected them between stretches of transplanted sod and geranium beds. Women in nurses'
uniforms, and surgeons twiddling stethoscopes, and hospital corps attendants bearing trays of food, went along the paths. Sometimes the surgeons stopped to talk about this or that case, in their professional jargon. Some were youngsters who had not yet begun practice; others of the old regular service had looked after the health of Mr. Thomas Atkins in India and out-of-the-way places, where flies and mosquitoes are busy in tropical heat with their wicked occupations; and still others were grey-haired, eminent specialists from London used to receive fees that gave the youngsters a giddy feeling, but now working for a lieutenant's pay. All the talent and skill of the medical and surgical world were at the service of this repair shop of damaged men.
Indoors the X-ray ”sharp” was always busy locating bits of steel as black points on hazy photographs; still forms were wheeled into the operating-room so softly that it seemed as simple a business as slipping a paper into a drawer; the beds in the wards were in rows between a broad aisle, with screens moved here and there by the noiseless sleight-of-hand of nurses trained to their part no less than infantry in the use of the bayonet.
One of the nurse's duties is to smile. However tired she is she must smile, just as a soldier must salute and obey orders with alacrity. A smile in pa.s.sing for the fellow with one eye showing through a swathe of bandages, for him with splinted legs held fast by weights, or the one dreamily convalescent, and particularly for the one quivering with pain. The man who awakes from a sweet sleep or the one who has been in a nightmare with a dozen machine-guns playing on him and bombs bursting all around, is greeted by a smile as he returns to the world of reality.
The nurse has life, strength, tenderness in her facile, confident attention to those who are without strength and dependent as children.
She makes each patient feel that he is the only one in the world, which is the way that patients like to feel. All the nurses without exception seemed good-looking, even the plain ones when you looked into their kindly eyes as they turned toward you.
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