Part 5

Then the photographer’s head disappeared beneath the black camera cloth. It would be vain to deny that the men enjoyed it hugely. They watched with eagerness as the photographer’s head emerged from the dark folds. He altered slightly the position of the cast, looked again, and made a second change.

“Good!” he exclaimed at length briskly; and he held up a warning hand. “Now! Ready, old man! Tell your leg to smile! Tell it to regard the little bird.”

At this threadbare joke a veritable shout of laughter went up from the ward. Even the dying man smiled!

“_Regardez!_ He smiles!” cried a soldier, pointing. “_Bon garçon!_”

The mirth renewed itself. It was the strangest death scene I had ever viewed.

Number Two lingered through the night and slipped away the next morning so quietly that none of us knew the exact moment; and his strength and his smile at the photographer’s jest became a legend in the ward.

There is much talk nowadays of the great number of desertions, and one’s fancy is fed by all kinds of wild and fantastic tales. Most of them are pure inventions, or have grown, like snowballs rolling down hill, from the merest innocent fact. The French are not deserters by temperament. One does not hear of whole companies of Frenchmen, bereft of their officers, falling on their knees, lifting up their hands, and crying: “_Kamerad!_ Spare me; for I am a father!” Simply, that is not the French note. To drag in his papahood at such a moment would appear to a Frenchman as grotesquely humorous and absurd.

And yet it would be idle to assert that there have been no French desertions. But most of them are pathological cases. The human brain can experience just so much bloodshed, so much killing, without going a little mad. And the more sensitive, finely tempered and humanitarian the person, the heavier the spiritual strain.

The following story is a case in point. It was told me by the would-be deserter himself, a young playwright of twenty-four, called, let us say, Vernier, who had been invalided back to Paris. He related it with a certain mordant humor, as being something of a joke on himself. The background of the story, his repeated wounds and illnesses, his hatred of killing, which grew with the months into a morbid soul sickness, were supplied by his mother and a friend:

Vernier, nervous, high-strung, idealistic, had been in the war since the days of mobilization. Repeatedly wounded, but never gravely, constantly ill from exposure, he gravitated back and forth between the trenches and the hospitals, not remaining very long at a time in either. He took part in a number of attacks and killed a number of Germans. He didn’t like it. About Christmas he wrote to his mother: “To be a really successful trench warrior one should be made of pig iron clean through: no head, no heart, no nerves!” And he added: “Frankly I am sick, sick, sick to death of it all.”

Shortly after this he was wounded again and went to the hospital; a month later he was back in the lines. Threatened with a relapse, he was sent to a shelter behind the trenches. And here the breakdown came. Fortunately his mother was with him. To her Vernier declared he had killed his last man in battle. He swore a solemn oath never to take another human life. He was through! He was going to clear out, escape to Canada, become a farmer and start life anew.

He spoke wildly, passionately, in tones that carried far beyond the small room. His mother listened, gray with terror. She implored him not to be foolish, to hush, to speak lower; to consider himself, his mother, France. Vernier, however, remained firm.

“But they’ll shoot you, my son, as a deserter!”

And to this Vernier vehemently replied:

“Mother, can’t you conceive that it’s more honorable to stand up against a wall and die publicly for your faith than to die like a dog in a hole in the ground for something you don’t believe? No; I’ve killed my last man, I tell you! If they want to kill me for that let them kill.”

Frenzied, the mother flung herself upon him, trying to stifle with her hand that dangerous young mouth; but the damage was already done. His loud speech had been overheard. Within the hour he was summoned before the commandant and asked whether the charge were true. Far from denying, Vernier admitted everything up to the hilt; he even went farther and embroidered his point of view. The commandant listened attentively; and at the end he spoke.

“He told me,” related Vernier in excellent English, “that in ordinary circumstances I should be shot the next morning as a deserter--and thus achieve what was so evidently my desire. But there was somebody else to be considered--namely, my mother. For, in overhearing me, they had overheard her entreaties as well. The son of such a mother must be worth saving; and, therefore, he was returning my life, plainly forfeit, to this brave mother of France. But he named a condition. And after that,” continued Vernier with a reminiscent grin, “he simply cut loose and lit into me. Asked ironically whether I supposed I was the only man in France who was opposed to the shedding of blood! I was a socialist, eh? Well, he was a philosophic anarchist! Went me one stronger, you see.”

And this was the commandant’s condition: He asked Vernier to remember that this bloody war was a trial, not to him alone but to all Frenchmen with a spiritual nature; and, as they were strong for the common good, he asked Vernier to be strong also--and hold his tongue. Simply that--to be strong and hold his tongue! And to this Vernier consented. He had to, he said, after the commandant’s courtesy to his mother. And, also, he was not going to be outdone in delicacy. When last heard of, Vernier was still holding his tongue Out There.

There was one question the soldiers asked constantly. They began the first day I entered the hospital; and I had no reply. On the last day they were still asking it; and still I had no reply. That question was: When will the United States enter the war?

Observe the form of that question. They did not say If, but When? For to most of them it seemed inevitable that, sooner or later, we, the big sister republic, with kindred form of government and ideals, should come to see what France, with her fine lucidity, had seen for so long: that she is battling not alone for her own right to exist as a free, unenslaved nation--though assuredly she is doing that--but for America also, and for the doctrine of democracy, as opposed to the doctrines of force and the gauntleted fist, all over the world.

But also, quite aside from this, the French soldiers want us to come in because they like us personally. They like us and they want us to fight upon their side.

Not long ago Georges expressed these sentiments in a nutshell. He had been lying staring up at the Stars and Stripes, which, with the Tricolor, was tacked above the ward door.

“It’s pretty,” he remarked pensively, “that starry flag. It’s not bad at all, truly! And it goes well with ours. It would be pleasant to see them both flying at large over Verdun--_n’est-ce-pas_, mees?”

As I write this, that wish of a wounded French soldier boy has come true.

MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING

“Watch that man!” said the nurse to her volunteer aid, nodding toward a bed that had been tilted at an angle by means of wooden blocks inserted under the legs, so that its occupant, a wounded Frenchman, lay downhill, his feet higher than his head. He looked as if he were past the need of watching and were dead already, that rigid, immobile, white-draped figure. His face was a livid mask, with heavy shadows beneath the closed lids, pinched nostrils, deep carved lines of pain round the bluish mouth, and a black unkempt bristle of beard that showed up startlingly against the white of the pillows. Not a movement, not a stir or visible breath or touch of warm living color. He was a fresh arrival, thirty-six hours from Verdun, and in the morning--if he lasted that long!--he was going up for operation. Both of his legs were broken above the knees.

“Watch that man!” warned the nurse again from the door. “I’m going off duty for two hours. Lord, I’m tired!”

“Oh, I’ll watch him all right,” promised the young aid confidently. “That’s what I’m here for,” she added with dreamy sweetness.

The nurse walked over to the bed, bent down and took the soldier’s pulse.

“He seems all right,” she murmured dubiously. “Pretty weak. Well, keep an eye on him.” She sighed a sigh of pure fatigue and departed.

Left to herself, the auxiliary fussed about the ward for a few minutes, after which she, too, crossed to the bedside of the man on whom she had been commanded to keep an eye. For a space she stood staring down watchfully upon him. That was what she had been told to do, and she did it conscientiously.

Then, her duty performed, she returned to her seat at the table and commenced a letter to a girl friend. And while she is thus engaged, and the stage is set for action--and probably tragic action--let me give a brief thumbnail sketch of her.

It was a big war hospital in France, and the volunteer aid was a girl from the Middle West who, in a fine white flame of enthusiasm for the Allied cause, had come all the way from her native town as fast as train and ship could bear her in order to nurse the fine, brave, glorious and magnificent French soldiers. For it was with such glowing adjectives that she described them, and she could not even think of them without springing tears. The dear, rugged, war-torn heroes, flat upon beds of pain, with romantic white bandages bound about their brows, gazing up at her with unutterable gratitude in their dying eyes. For it was thus, movie-wise, she pictured them; and she pictured herself as a nurse, a sort of ministering-angel-of-mercy ingénue cast, divinely compassionate, dressed for the part in pure spotless white garments, on her head that very becoming French coif--it had looked so attractive in the pictures; she really must have one of them--bending over a dying _poilu_, soothing his fevered brow with cool white fingers, murmuring gentle words of hope, promising to write to his mother, and finally kissing him good-by into Heaven. She had read of nurses doing that, of soldiers whispering faintly, “Kiss me good-by for my mother!” And she knew--she had a sure instinct--that she would be good in that part. For, as she told her girl friend, she had so much sympathy and tenderness in her nature!

So great had been her zeal to help along the above lines that she had not tarried to take any tiresome, humdrum courses in nursing. For the war might be over any time, she argued, and she couldn’t bear to lose a single precious instant. And so she had come right on. She had come right on, and with fool’s luck she had arrived in Paris at an opportune moment--for her. A mighty drive was on on the Western Front, and the backwash of French wounded was pouring in--a vast, unending, sanguinary tide. It was the tail end of summer, a terrific, heart-breaking summer, on top of a terrific heart-breaking spring, and no let-up in sight. Doctors and nurses and aids were exhausted, pegged out, at the end of their tethers. Some of the workers had collapsed under the abnormal tension, and the rest toiled on, showing their fatigue by curt crisp orders, by quick bursts of irritation or sudden explosions of savage temper. It was into this dynamic atmosphere that romantic little Miss Greenhorn walked one day, utterly incompetent technically and spiritually, but self-confident, unabashed, full of her dream of those fine, splendid French soldiers--poor, wounded darlings!--and strong in the belief of her own divine function to succor and save--in that very attractive coif: And they gave her a place. Such was the stern necessity of the hour. Here was another pair of hands, another pair of feet; certainly they could scrub tables, carry slops, run errands, and thus divert fatigue from the more important trained members of the corps. And so Miss Greenhorn donned her coif--her premonition concerning it was right; it was, indeed, very fetching--and prepared blithely to materialize her Florence-Nightingale-Mary-Pickford dream.

They assigned her to a small ward of ten. The orderly had not arrived, which is a salient characteristic of orderlies, and the nurse bade her take a pail of slops to the lavabo. It was a heavy pail, too heavy for her slight shoulders. After that she carried piles of blood-stained linen to the same destination, and following hard upon that several morning bedpans. It was not distinguished work, and dainty little Miss Greenhorn performed these lowly duties with a disdainful nose in air. ’Twas not for this she had traveled all the way to France! The ward doctor, noting the contemptuous, gingerly fashion in which she held her burdens at arm’s length from her immaculate linen costume, murmured ironically to the nurse:

“We’ve got a queen in disguise among us. Look out!”

Presently she was set to make a bed. Now in the course of all her fair young life Miss Greenhorn had not made half a dozen beds, and, moreover, she did not deem it a matter of grave importance. Still she was willing to oblige.

“Poor man!” she breathed, hanging above him tenderly. “How grateful he must feel toward me!” And, smiling her Florence-Nightingale-Mary-Pickford smile, she began pulling away a sheet at random. The soldier let out a yell of fury:

“Imbecile! Are you trying to kill me? Oh, _mon Dieu_! Get out!”

The nurse dropped her work and came running. It appeared that, instead of the bed sheet proper, the novice had got hold of another which, quadruple-folded, formed part of the padding of a wooden fracture-box that held the soldier’s broken leg; and with the first tug she had all but capsized the entire apparatus and spilled fracture-box, leg and soldier out upon the floor.

Miss Greenhorn backed off from the scene, deeply mortified. Her sensitive feelings were hurt. The man had called her an imbecile! The very first words a French soldier had addressed to her--to her who had traveled five thousand miles to nurse him--had been not “You are heavenly kind, miss!” or “Kiss me, for I am dying!” but a brutal “Imbecile! Get out!” It was a rude jolt to her rosy dream. In addition, the nurse reprimanded her sharply, and for the next two back-breaking hours she made beds under a dragon eye of supervision, made and remade them.

Everything she did was wrong, clumsy, maladroit, and had to be altered twice, thrice, while the men turned pale under the prolonged strain and sweated or muttered nervously “Let be, mees! Enough! Oh, good God!” After her first mishap they were deadly afraid of her. And so sensitive spots went unbathed, uneased; temperatures shot up, and infected wounds began to throb, while little Miss Greenhorn took her first lesson in nursing. It was hard upon her, for everyone within the circle of her inexpert activities became irritated and vented their irritation freely; but it was even harder on her victims, the soldiers of France she had come so far to serve.

After two hours of constant stooping, kneeling and lifting heavy and helpless men, little red lightnings of pain began to play up and down her spine, her shoulder muscles ached cruelly, and there was a dull roaring in her ears. Her feet, too, already swollen in their fashionable white buckskin pumps, began to hurt atrociously and to show a congested purple beneath the transparent white-silken hose. Above all things on earth, she desired to sit down five minutes and rest. Instead of this the nurse bade her disinfect a bed. Another unwieldy mattress to tug and haul about!

“Do I have to put this strong stuff into the water?” she demanded plaintively, holding up the disinfecting fluid. “It’ll spoil my hands!”

She was proud of those hands. They were delicate and cool and white. And, besides, they were part of the stage property of her movie dream.

“If you intend to disinfect the bed, do so,” returned the nurse dryly. “The case in that bed died of gas gangrene, and I shouldn’t care to expose another patient to the microbes, even at the risk of spoiling your hands.”

“May I have a pair of rubber gloves then?”

“We’re short of rubber gloves just now. What we have are needed in the operating room.”

Miss Greenhorn bent to her task in silence. Her cheeks were burning and her eyes were blurred with tears of rage and fatigue. As she stooped, dabbing futilely here and there with her cloth, the blunt voice of the nurse came to her:

“Don’t shirk your work that way. That isn’t half disinfected. Here, give me the rag.” And, squatting comfortably, she proceeded to give a thorough demonstration. “Don’t be afraid to use a little elbow grease,” she concluded ironically.

Miss Greenhorn bit back an angry retort. She had not come over to France to do low, menial, scrubby, grubby work and then be treated like a servant. At home she gave orders instead of receiving them. But aloud she only said “Thank you!” so low that the nurse glanced at her keenly and added: “Never mind. You’ll learn some day. Now suppose you wash all the bedside tables. Remove everything from them first. And after that, if there’s time, scrub the big table. Then the men’s _déjeuner_ will be coming along. Have you got the hot drinks from the diet kitchen? Ah, but I told you to do that always before eleven o’clock! The kitchen’s closed now and the poor chaps have lost their nourishment for the morning. Try not to fail on that again. Oh, before you begin on the tables, please make me a hot compress for Number Two. You don’t know how? Very well!” And with a smothered exclamation of impatience she hurried off to make it herself.

Somewhat subdued, Miss Greenhorn began on her tables. A few minutes later a peculiar sound from the adjacent bed caused her to look up and then cry hastily:

“Oh, nurse! That poor man--Number Six--he’s vomiting.”

But the nurse, with the hot compress and a patient’s broken arm in her hands, could not disengage herself instantly. Moreover, her patience for the moment had gone into complete eclipse.

“When a man vomits, don’t call me!” she barked savagely. “Hold something!”

But unfortunately little Miss Greenhorn could find nothing to hold. Terribly disconcerted, she flew round wildly in a circle, like a kitten chasing its tail, seeking a suitable vessel. But nothing seemed to present itself to her distracted gaze. The pail? Obviously too large! The bedside wine cup? Obviously too small! Oh, where---- But by this time the nurse had caught up a basin and was supporting the sick man’s head.

“He’s gone through everything,” she said wearily. “We’ll have to change the entire bed. Fetch some linen. And next time use a little horse sense, if you’ve such a thing concealed about your person.”

During the change the patient groaned horribly. The sweat of exhaustion poured from his face. His flesh was clammy.

“Get some hot-water bottles,” the nurse ordered tersely. “No, never mind, I’ll do it. You’d probably scald him!”

Miss Greenhorn returned to her tables, the corners of her mouth dipping like those of a baby whose hands have been slapped. And during the rest of the morning Number Six’s white face reproached her mutely.

In the afternoon she left another wide swath of errors behind her. The men thanked her politely, but declined her kind offers to shake up their pillows. When she took the temperatures she broke three thermometers hand-running, and French thermometers were rare commodities.

“I think they must have been cracked,” she apologized. “They snapped so easily.”

Later, marking up the temperature charts, she made atrocious blunders. Normal patients suddenly exhibited fever peaks high as the Himalayas. The astounded ward doctor, discovering such a one and its source, swore fervently and voted her a pest, with a double-barreled profane adjective attached. That night her feet ached so that she cried when she removed her shoes. And for that night and many nights thereafter she had her dinner in bed and fell to sleep immediately from sheer exhaustion.

And now, the résumé complete, let us skip a week and return to Miss Greenhorn as she sat writing a letter to her friend. Every few minutes, true to her orders, she had risen for a look at the patient she had been set to watch. She watched him dutifully, ignorantly. She was still Miss Greenhorn, with one short week of experience. Not once did it occur to her to query: What am I to watch this man for? What is likely to happen? What shall I do if it does? And yet she was not a particularly stupid girl. She was rather above the average in intelligence and eagerness; but so firmly had she riveted her gaze upon the romantic, the false, the pseudo-æsthetic aspects of her job, that she was temporarily blinded to its actual features. But that the unriveting process had already begun and was somewhat painful was evidenced by her letter to her friend. And as the man she was set to watch seems quiet, ominously quiet, let us peep a moment over her shoulder:

“DEAREST AMELIA: This is the very first time I have had a chance to sit down since I entered the hospital a week ago to-day. And oh, Amelia, before I say another word, I want to tell you: Don’t come over! Don’t, Amelia, don’t! With your delicate health you never would be able to stand it. The work is simply terrible--hard, brutal, back-breaking, menial. You should see my poor hands! And my feet! And never a single word of thanks from anybody. They just seem to take you and your sacrifices for granted, and they expect you to know how to do things letter-perfect, right off the reel. Of course I don’t know anything.