Part 14

They are asking some explanation at the hands of those who claim the sacrifice of their homes and lives and all men hold dear. Who is to answer their righteous questioning?

Sometimes in my dreams I see a great Judgment seat where Kings and Emperors, and diplomats, and politicians, and wire pullers and profiteers will have to answer to the blood stained hosts they summoned to fight and die, for what?

I am due back in the French camps in about ten days' time and I am half afraid to go. I can't answer all the questions they will put to me. I don't know enough.

In the early days you could play upon their mobile hearts as on a harp of ten strings; tears and laughter and smiles we had then, all side by side, with the most glorious courage the world has ever seen.

In some of the battalions now you find the fathers of the boys who sleep in Flanders and in France.

Oh, Cornelia, the waste, the wanton waste and cruelty of war. Where is it tending? Where shall we be brought before it is over? Sometimes my brain reels at the thought.

Meanwhile the band is slowly tightening.

We have not had any butter at home for over a week.

*XIII*

The awful suspense about Himself I was enduring when I wrote last was broken at last by a cable from France. It came from Effie at Camiers and it took me some time to grasp its meaning. "Safe, unhurt; tell your mother," was every word it said.

Florence and I, poring distractedly over it together, could only arrive at the conclusion that there had been a disaster at sea, in which our troopship was involved. We did not even know its name, from what port it had sailed, or whither bound; in fact we did not know he had sailed at all from the French base.

It is the black darkness in which one has to live which makes it so hard to be a soldier's wife in war times. A few more awful days had to be lived through--whole ten of them, then a long, closely written letter from Himself, arrived from a port in France, whose very name was not given.

But the story was wonderfully vivid and full; in fact I didn't know how it had passed the Censor, till I saw his own signature on the envelope, indicating that he had censored it himself.

I must not enclose the letter, nor yet tell you all it contained, because I want you to get what I am writing. These are the facts:

They set sail from Marseilles after long, dreary waiting in a particularly unpleasant camp, and next morning at ten o'clock were torpedoed off the Italian coast, not far from Genoa. Do you remember Genoa and its terraces where we met first, so long ago that it seems as if it must have been in some other existence?

You know how Himself writes, very simply and directly, without any embroideries, but his narrative was far more impressive than if he had tried to make it effective. It simply just makes you see it all, realise the horror of it.

The first torpedo disabled the ship, but if the enemy had left it at that, she could have been taken into port under her own steam.

There was, of course, a good deal of excitement and the boats were difficult to handle, apparently they had never been inspected or tested for any emergency. Can you conceive it, Cornelia, we have been three years at war and yet such elementary precautions are left to chance?

Priceless time was lost grappling with them, and before they could be lowered, priceless lives were lost. Himself waiting calmly, ready for the emergency,--or for the end, for which he needed no preparation, saw the second shell launched from the submarine. Many of the boats had got clear. One had the sixty nurses who comprised the hospital unit; sitting up to their middles in water, they sang hymns to cheer those drifting helpless in the sea.

The second torpedo found its mark amidships and the gallant boat went down in eight minutes.

The only chance for those still remaining on her decks was to jump into the sea. But that takes a special kind of courage; only those who had it were saved; the rest went down in the awful swirl of the sinking ship. Himself was picked up by a Japanese destroyer, filled with wonder that he who had done his day's work should have been saved, while so many of his boys, with all their lives in front, should have gone down. It is a great mystery.

How often have we asked ourselves that kind of question during these dreadful years. So many of us would have gone so gladly in their place.

They were landed at the port of Savonna. The Italians were extraordinarily kind to them, furnishing them with food and wine and clothing of every kind. He enclosed some snapshots--one actually taken of the sinking ship. There will be people, I am sure, ready with the camera on the Judgment Day. One of these snapshots depicts Himself in his riding breeches and leggings and an Italian military cloak, which makes him look like a bandit.

He lost everything except that which he happened to have on at the moment. All the lovely new Eastern kit, to say nothing of his photographs, letters, and dear intimate possessions, are at the bottom of the sea.

Nothing matters except that he is safe. He has no idea what will happen to him now--he supposes they will just have to wait for another ship. Meanwhile he is getting a little respite from the Spartan rigours of one of the worst cantonments he has ever struck, by being a voluntary patient in a hospital.

What he says about that is very amusing. He has been accustomed to boss a hospital, and now he is being very effectively and vigorously bossed. I fear he is not chastened yet, but only rebellious.

I can smile at it all because my heart is lightened of its load. God means him to come back to me, or he would have gone down in the Mediterranean.

It is odd how in this war, you have convictions about this one and that; the sort of presentiment who will get safely through, and who will never come back. But they are not always true. I felt so sure about Dick, of whom I wrote in my last letter. I felt that his kind, the very highest type of fearless soldier and a fine Christian gentleman, was so much needed here, that God would care for him specially. When one thinks of how many like him lie on the blood-soaked fields, one is staggered, and uncertain about the future of the race.