Young Hilda At The Wars Part 16

"And her breathing?" asked Hilda. "I can hear her with each breath."

"Yes, it is hard with her. Her body is torn, and the breath is loud as it comes. It will soon be over. She will not suffer long."

Hilda and her companion stepped out into the open air, and climbed into the waiting motor. The banker was crying and swearing softly to himself.

"The little children who have died, what becomes of them?" said Hilda.

"Will they have a chance to play somewhere? And the children still in pain, here and everywhere in Belgium--will it be made up to them? Will a million of indemnity give them back their playtime? That little girl whom you touched--"

"The hair," he said, "did you see her hair? The same color as yours."

"I know," said Hilda, "I saw myself in her place. I feel that I could go out and kill."

"It was the hair," repeated the banker. "My little daughter's hair is the color of yours. That was why I let you say those things to me that evening in London. I could not sleep that night for thinking of all you said. And when I looked across the room just now, I thought it was my daughter lying there. For a moment, I thought I saw my daughter."

THE BONFIRE

We were prisoners, together--twenty-seven peasants and three of us that had been too curious of the enemy's camp. We were huddled in the dirt of a field, with four sentries over us, and three thousand soldiers round about us. Just across the country road, twenty-six little yellow-brick houses were blazing, the homes of the peasants of Melle. Each house was a separate torch, for they had been carefully primed with oil. The light of them, and almost the heat, was on our faces. It was a clear, warm evening. The fires of the cottages burned high. A full moon rose blood-red on the horizon, climbed to the dome and went across the sky to the south-west. Two dogs, chained in the yard of a burning house, howled all night. The peasant lying next us watched his home burn to pieces. It was straight across from us. A soldier came to tell him that his wife was wounded but not dead. He lay through the night, motionless, and not once did he turn his eyes away from the blaze of his home. Petrol burns slowly and thoroughly.

In the early morning, soldiers with stretchers came marching down the road. They turned in at the smouldering cottages.

From the ruins of the little house which the peasant had watched so intently, three bodies were carried. He broke into a long, slow sobbing.

VIII

THE WAR BABY

"A baby?" cried Hilda in amazement.

"A baby, my dear," repeated Mrs. Bracher with emphasis. "Come, hurry up!

We're wanted _tout de suite_."

The women had been sitting quite peacefully after supper. A jerk at the bell cord, a tiny tinkle, and Mrs. Bracher had answered the door. A big breathless civilian stood there. He said--

"Please, the Madame Doctor, quick. The baby is coming."

These astonishing peasants! Hilda could never get over her wonder at their stolidity, their endless patience, their matter-of-fact way of carrying on life under a cataclysm. They went on with their spading in the fields, while shrapnel was pinging. They trotted up and down a road that was pock-marked with sh.e.l.l-holes. They hung out their washings where machine-gun bullets could aerate them. 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 sh.e.l.l fire, scoured the fields for shrapnel bullets and bits of sh.e.l.ls. They brought their findings to the nurses, and received pieces of chocolate in return. There was a family of five children, in steps, who wore bright red hoods. They liked to come and be nursed. The women had from six to a dozen peasants a day, tinkling the bell for treatment. Some came out of curiosity. To these was fed castor-oil. One dose cured them. They came with every sort of ailment. 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. You stay and suffer, and meantime you live. Still you plant and plough, though the guns are loud in the night, and Les Bosches just over the meadow. And here was one of these women in the wrecked, charred village of Pervyse carrying on the great, natural process of life as unperturbed as if her home was in a valley of peace.

The three women ran over to a little house two hundred yards down the road. One wall of it was bullet-chipped, one room of it a wreck from a spent obus. But, for the rest, it was a livable little place, and here was gathered a Flemish family. The event was half over, as Mrs. Bracher, closely followed by Scotch and Hilda, rushed in. The mother, fully dressed, was lying on a wooden bed that fitted into an alcove. She was typically Flemish, of high cheek-bones and very red cheeks. The entire family was grouped about the bed--a boy of twelve years, a girl of nineteen, and a girl of three. Attending the case, was a little old woman, the grandmother, wearing a knitted k.n.o.bby bonnet, sitting high on the top of her head and tied under her chin--a conical frame for her pert, dark eyes and firm mouth. She was a tiny woman, every detail of her in miniature, clearly defined, except the heavy, noisy wooden shoes.

She carried in her personality an air of important indignation. With the confidence of a lifetime of obstetrical experience, she drew from her pocket a brown string, coa.r.s.e and dirty, and tied up the newcomer's navel. It was little the nurses were allowed to help. Though a trained and certificated midwife, Mrs. Bracher was edged out of the ministration by the small, determined grandmother, who looked anger and scorn out of her little black eyes upon the three. She resented their coming.

Antiseptic gauze and hot-water bottles were as alien as the Germans to her.

So "Pervyse" entered this world. Nothing could hold him back, neither sh.e.l.l nor bayonets. He had slipped through the net of death which men were so busily weaving. There he was, a matter of fact--a vital, l.u.s.ty, shapeless fact. To that little creature was given the future, and he was stronger than the artillery. By all the laws, vibrations of fear ought to have pa.s.sed into the tiny body. His consciousness, it would seem, must be a nest of horrors. Instead of that, his cry had the insistence of health. His solemnity was as abysmal as that of a child of peace.

When the girls visited "Pervyse" next morning, the grandmother was nursing him with sugar and water from a quart bottle. She had him dressed in dark blue calico. Thereafter twice a day they called upon him, and each time Hilda carried snowy linen, hoping to win the grandmother. But the old lady was firm, and "Pervyse" was to thrive, looking all the redder, inside blue calico. The mother was a good mother, sweet and constant. Very slowly, the nurses won her confidence and the grandmother's respect.

"Do come away," urged Hilda. "Let me take you all back to La Panne, where it is safer. Give 'Pervyse' his chance. It is senseless to live here in this shed under sh.e.l.l fire. Some day, the guns will get you, and then it will be too late."

But always they refused, mother, and brother, and big and little sister, and grandmother. The village was their place. The shed was their home.

Hilda brought her beautiful big ambulance to their door. There was room enough inside for them all to go together, with their bundles of household goods. And the mother smiled, saying:

"The sh.e.l.ls will spare me. They will not hurt me."

"You refuse me to-day," replied Hilda, "but to-morrow I shall come again to take you away. I will take you to a new, safe home."

Very early the next morning, Hilda heard the sick crumble that meant the crunching of one more dwelling. She hurried to the door, and looked down the road. The place of the new birth had tumbled, and a thick smoke was rising from the wreck. She ran faster than she had ever run for her own safety. She came to the little home in a ruin of plaster and gla.s.s and brick-dust. Destruction, long overdue, had fallen out of the sunny blue sky on the group of reckless survivors in that doomed village. The soldiers were searching in the smoking litter for bodies. Big sister and little sister and brother were dead, and the little old grandmother. The mother, with sh.e.l.l wounds at her nursing b.r.e.a.s.t.s, was dying. Only "Pervyse" was living and to live. By a miracle of selection, he lay in the wreck of his house and the grave of his people--one foot half off, but otherwise a survivor of the sh.e.l.l that had fallen and burst inside his home.

Swiftly Hilda in her car, carried mother and child to La Panne to the great military hospital. The mother died in two hours on the operating table, and "Pervyse" was alone in a world at war.

The story and fame of him spread through the last city left to the Belgians. All the rest of their good land was trampled by the alien and marred by sh.e.l.l-fire and petrol. Here, alone in Flanders, there was still music in the streets, even if it was often a dead march. And here life was still normal and orderly. "Pervyse" found shelter in the military hospital where his mother had come only to die. He was the youngest wounded Belgian in all the wards. They put him in a private room with a famous English Colonel, and they called the two "Big Tom"

and "Little Tom." The blue calico was changed for white things and "Pervyse" had a deep, soft cradle and more visitors than he cared to see.

The days of his danger and flight were evil days in Pervyse, for the guns grew busier and more deadly. There came a last day for the famous little dressing-station of the women. It began with trouble at the trenches. Two boys of nineteen years were brought in to the nurses. One of them was carrying the brains of a dead comrade on his pocket. A sh.e.l.l had burst in their trench, giving them head wounds. They died in the hall. They had served two days at the front. The women placed them on stretchers in the kitchen, and covered their faces, and left them in peace. A brief peace, for a sh.e.l.l found the kitchen, and the blue fumes of it puffed into the room where the women were sitting. The orderly and four soldier friends came running in, holding their eyes. When Hilda entered the kitchen, she saw that the sh.e.l.l had hit just above those quiet bodies, bringing the rafters and gla.s.s and brick upon them. A beam, from the rafter, had been driven into the breast of one of the boys--transfixing him as if by a lance. Sh.e.l.ls were breaking in the road, the garden, the field and the near-by houses, every five seconds.

In her own house, bricks were strewn about, and the windows smashed in.

A large hole, in a shed back of the house, marked the flight of a sh.e.l.l, and behind it lay a dead man who had taken refuge there.

A Belgian had driven up their car a moment before and it was standing at the door. One soldier started to the car--a sh.e.l.l drove him back--a second dash and he made it, turned the car, and the women darted in.

They sped down the road to the edge of the village, and here the nurses found shelter. Later that day the Colonel handed them a written order to evacuate Pervyse, lent them men to help, and gave them twenty minutes in which to pack and depart. They returned to their smashed house, and piled out their household goods. They left in the ambulance with all the soldiers cheering them. They were a sad little lot. So the loyal four months of service were ended under a few hours of gun-fire, and Hilda and her friends had to follow "Pervyse" to his new home.

As she went down the road, she took one last look at the shattered place. No house in her earthly history had concentrated so many memories. There she had put off the care-free girl, and achieved her womanhood, as if at a stroke. There she and her friends had healed a thousand soldiers. They had welcomed the Queen, princes, generals, brave officers soon to die, famous artists under arms, laughing peasant soldiers, the great and the obscure, such a society gathered under the vast pressure of a world-war as had seldom graced the "At-Homes" of an Iowa girl. There she had won fame, and a dearer thing yet, honor, which needs not to be known in order to shed its lonely comfort. She was leaving it all, forever, in that heap of plaster and crumbling brick.

She had rarely had him out of mind since that experience in Wetteren Convent, when they two had visited the little girl who lay dying of her bayonet wounds. But it was a full five months since she had seen him.

"I had to come back," said Hinchcliffe; "New York seemed out of it. I know there is work for me here--some little thing I can do to help you all.

"What luck?" he added.

"A sh.e.l.l has been following me around," replied Hilda. "So far, it has aways called too late, or missed me by a few feet of masonry. But it's on my trail. It took the windows out of my room at a doctor's house in Furnes. Later on, it went clean through my little room up over a tailor's shop. In Pervyse we had our Poste de Secours in the Burgomaster's house. One morning we had stepped out for a little air--we were a couple of hundred yards down the road--when a big sh.e.l.l broke in the house. And now our last home in Pervyse is blown to pieces.

Luck is good to me."

Hinchcliffe took his place, and a strong place it was, in the strange life of La Panne. A word from him smoothed out tangles. The etat Major approved of him. He was twice arrested as a spy, and enjoyed the experience hugely. At one time, there was a deficiency of tires of the right make, and he put a rush order clear across the Atlantic and had the consignment over in record time. He cut through the red tape of the transport service, red tape that had been annoying even the established hospitals. He imported comforts for the helpers. There was a special brand of tea which the English nurses were missing. So there was nothing for it, but his London agent must accompany the lot in person to La Panne. There was something restless, consuming, in his activity.