Part 19

'God help his mother!' said the chaplain softly. 'It was her the boy was thinking of--not himself. His father was killed yesterday--old Jim Doherty, twenty-three years' service; batman to the O.C.; would come out again with young Jim and Walt. Been with the Regiment all his life; and the Regiment has taken him and his two boys, and left the mother to her old age without husband or chick or child.'

The two doctors were lighting cigarettes and inhaling the smoke deeply, with the enjoyment that comes after hours without tobacco.

Another man was borne in. He was grimed with dust and dirt, and smeared with blood. The sweats of agony beaded his forehead, but he grinned a twisted grin at the doctors and chaplain. 'An' 'ere we are again, as the song says,' he said, as the stretcher was laid down. 'This makes the third time wounded in this war--twice 'ome an' out again. But this is like to be the last trip I'm thinkin'. Wot about it, sir? Will I be losin' 'em both?' And he looked down at his smashed legs. 'Ah, I thought so,' he went on. 'I'm a market gardener, but I dunno 'ow I'm goin' to market-garden without legs. Four kids too, the eldest six years, an' an ailin' wife. But she'll 'ave me, or wot's left o' me; an' that's more'n a many'll 'ave.'

'That'll be all right, my lad,' said the chaplain. 'You'll have a pension. The country will look after you.'

'Ah, padre--I didn't see you, sir. The country? Arst my brother Joe about the country. Wounded in South Africa 'e was, an' never done a day's work since. An' the pension 'as been barely enough to starve on decently. It'll be the same again arter all this is over I don't doubt. Any'ow that's 'ow we all feels about it. No, sir, I don't feel no great pain to speak of. Sort of numb-like below there just.'

He went on talking quite rationally and composedly until he was taken away.

After that there was another pause, and the ambulances, for the first time that day, were able to get the station cleared before a fresh lot came in. The dusk was closing in, but there was still no abatement of the sounds of battle.

'There must be crowds of men lying out in front there wanting attention,' said the captain, reaching for his coat and putting it on quietly. 'You might stay here, Dewar, and I'll have a look out and see if there's a chance of getting forward to give a hand.'

The other doctor offered to go if the other would wait, but his offer was quietly put aside. 'I'll get back in an hour or two,' the captain said, and went off. Dewar and the chaplain stood in the door and watched him go. A couple of heavy shells crashed down on the parapet of the communication trench he was moving towards, and for a minute his figure was hidden by the swirling black smoke and yellow dust. But they saw him a moment later as he reached the trench, turned and waved a hand to them, and disappeared.

'His name's Macgillivray,' said the doctor, in answer to a question from the chaplain. 'One of the finest fellows I've ever met, and one of the cleverest surgeons in Great Britain. He is recognised as one of the best already, and he's only beginning. Did you notice him at work? The most perfect hands, and an eye as quick and keen as an eagle's. He misses nothing--sees little things in a flash where twenty men might pass them. He's a wonder.'

And Macgillivray was moving slowly along the communication trench that led to the forward fire trench. It was a dangerous passage, because the enemy's guns had the position and range exactly and were keeping a constant fire on the trench, knowing the probability of the supports using it. In fact the supports moving up had actually abandoned the use of the approach trenches and were hurrying across the open for the most part. Macgillivray, reluctant at first to abandon the cover of the trench, was driven at last to doing so by a fact forced upon him at every step that the place was a regular shell-trap. Sections of it were blown to shapeless ruins, and pits and mounds of earth and the deep shell-craters gaped in it and to either side for all its length. Even where the high-explosive shells had not fallen the shrapnel had swept and the clouds of flies that swarmed at every step told of the blood-soaked ground, even where the torn fragments of limbs and bodies had not been left, as they were in many places.

So Macgillivray left the trench and scurried across the open with bullets hissing and buzzing about his ears and shells roaring overhead. He reached the forward fire trench at last and halted there to recover his breath. The battered trench was filled with the men who had been moved up in support, and there were many wounded amongst them. He busied himself for half an hour amongst them, and then prepared to move on across the open to what had been the enemy's front-line trench. It was dusk now and shadowy figures could be seen coming back towards the British lines. At one point, a dip in the ground and an old ditch gave some cover from the flying bullets. Towards this point along what had been the face and was now the back of the enemy front trench, and then in along the line of the hollow, a constant procession of wounded moved slowly. It was easy to distinguish them, and even to pick out in most cases where they were wounded, because in the dusk the bandages of the first field dressing showed up startlingly white and clear on the shadowy forms against the shadowy background. Some, with the white patches on heads, arms, hands, and upper bodies, were walking; others, with the white on feet and legs, limped and hobbled painfully, leaning on the parapet or using their rifles crutch-wise; and others lay on the stretchers that moved with desperate slowness towards safety. The line appeared unending; the dim figures could be seen trickling along the parapets as far as the eye could distinguish them; the white dots of the bandages were visible moving as far along the parapet as the sight could could reach.

Macgillivray moved out from the broken trench and hurried across the open. There were not more than fifty yards to cross, but in that narrow space the bodies lay huddled singly and heaped in little clumps. They reminded one exactly of the loafers who sprawl asleep and sunning themselves in the Park on a Sunday afternoon. Only the dead lay in that narrow strip; the living had been moved or had moved themselves long since. Macgillivray pushed on into the trench, along it to a communication trench, and up and down one alley after another, until he reached the most advanced trench which the British held. Here a pandemonium of fighting was still in progress, but to this Macgillivray after the first couple of minutes paid no heed. A private with a bullet through his throat staggered back from his loophole and collapsed in the doctor's arms and after that Macgillivray had his hands too full with casualties to concern himself with the fighting. Several dug-outs had been filled with wounded, and the doctor crawled about amongst these and along the trench, applying dressings and bandages as fast as he could work, seeing the men placed on stretchers or sent back as quickly as possible towards the rear. He stayed there until a message reached him by one of the stretcher-bearers who had been back to the dressing station that he was badly needed there, and that Mr. Dewar hoped he would get back soon to help them.

Certainly the dressing station was having a busy time. The darkness had made it possible to get back hundreds of casualties from places whence they dare not be moved by day. They were pouring into the station through the doctors' hands--three of them were hard at work there by this time--and out again to the ambulances as rapidly as they could be handled. Despite the open, shell-wrecked end and the broken roof, the cottage was stiflingly close and sultry, the heavy scent of blood hung sickeningly in the stagnant air, and the whole place swarmed with pestering flies. There was no time to do much for the patients. All had been more or less efficiently bandaged by the regimental stretcher-bearers who picked them up. The doctors did little more than examine the bandagings, loosening these and tightening those, making injections to ward off tetanus, performing an operation or an amputation now and again in urgent cases, sorting out occasionally a hopeless casualty where a wound was plainly mortal, and setting him aside to leave room in the ambulances for those the hospitals below might yet save.

One of these mortal cases was a young lieutenant. He knew himself that there was little or no hope for him, but he smoked a cigarette and spoke with composure, or simulated composure, to the doctor and the chaplain.

'Hello, padre,' he said, 'looks like a wash-out for me this time. You'll have to break it to the pater, you know. Afraid he'll take it rather hard too. Rough luck, isn't it, doc.? But then . . .' His face twitched with pain, but he covered the break in his voice by blowing a long cloud of smoke. '. . . After all, it's all in the game, y' know.' 'All in the game,' the chaplain said when he had gone; 'a cruel game, but gallantly played out. And he's the fourth son to go in this war--and the last male of his line except his father, the old earl. A family that has made its mark on a good few history pages--and this is the end of it. You think it's quite hopeless for him, doctor?'

The doctor looked up in surprise from the fresh slightly wounded case he was overhauling. 'Hopeless? Why, it's not even---- Oh! him? Yes, I'm afraid so. . . . I wish Macgillivray would come back,' he went on irritably. 'He's worth the three of us here put together. Where we have to fiddle and probe and peer he would just look--just half-shut those hawk eyes of his and look, and he'd know exactly what to do and what not to do. . . . That'll do, sergeant; take him off. . . . Where's that bottle of mine? What's this? Hand? Bandage not hurting you? All right. Pass him over there for the anti-tetanus. Now, then! . . .'

A burly private, with the flesh of his thigh showing clear white where the grimy khaki had been cut clear and hung flapping, limped in and pushed forward a neatly bandaged limb for inspection. 'A doctor did that up in the trenches,' he remarked. 'Said to tell you 'e did it an' it was all right, an' I only needed the anti-tempus an' a ticket for 'ome.'

'That's Macgillivray, I'll bet,' said young Dewar. 'Where was this?'

'Fourth German trench, sir,' said the man cheerfully. 'You know we got four? Four trenches took! We're winnin' this time orright. Fairly got 'em goin', I b'lieve. It'll be Glorious Vict'ry in the 'eadlines to-morrow.'

'Things like this, you know, must be,' quoted the chaplain softly, as another badly wounded man was brought in. 'I wonder what the victory is costing us?'

'Never mind. It's costing t'other side more, sir,' said the casualty grimly, and then shut lips and teeth tight on the agony that followed.

'I wish Macgillivray would come,' said Dewar when that was finished. 'He could have done it so much better. It's just the sort of case he's at his best on--and his best is something the medical journals write columns about. I wish he'd come.'

And then, soon after, he did come--came on a stretcher with a bandage about his head and over his eyes. 'Macgillivray!' cried the young doctor, and stood a moment staring, with his jaw dropped.

'Yes,' said Macgillivray with lips tight drawn. 'It's me. That's Dewar, isn't it? No need to undo the bandage, Dewar. It's my eyes--both gone--a bullet through them both. And I'll never hold a scalpel again. You can give me some morphia, Dewar--and send me on to the ambulance out of the way. I'm no good here now--or anywhere else, now or ever. I won't die, I know, but----'

They gave him the morphia, and before he slid off into unconsciousness he spoke a last word to the chaplain: 'You were right, padre. You remember . . . it's the women pay the hardest. . . . I'm thinking . . . of . . . my wife.'

The chaplain's thoughts went back to the wife and mother of the Dohertys, to the legless market-gardener and his ailing wife, to the boy lieutenant who was the last of his line, and a score more he knew, and his eyes followed as the stretcher bore out the hulk that had been a man who had done much to relieve pain and might have done so much more.

The voice of another new-arriving casualty broke his thoughts. 'We're winnin', doctor,' it was saying exultantly. 'All along the line we're winnin' this time. The Jocks has got right away for'ard, an' the Ghurkies is in wid their killin' knives on our left. An' the Irish is in front av all. Glory be! 'Tis a big foight this time, an' it's winnin' we are. Me good arm's gone I know, but I'd rather be here wid wan arm than annywhere else wid two. An' what's an arm or a man more or less in the world? We're winnin', I tell ye--we're winnin'!'