Young Hilda At The Wars Part 15

"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-a.s.sistants 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 d.a.m.n 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 sh.e.l.l fire. You talk about results.

There are more results in pulling one Belgian out of the b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sing 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, ca.n.a.ls 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 ma.s.sed 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 gla.s.s, 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 b.u.t.t of their guns, and forced him to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s between their lines, giving me still more blows of the gun-b.u.t.t 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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."