Part 27

"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 attitude 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."

"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 shell-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 shell fire, scoured the fields for shrapnel bullets and bits of shells. 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 knobby 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, coarse 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 shell 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, lusty, 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 passed 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.