Part 28

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 shell 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 shells 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 glass 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 shell wounds at her nursing breasts, 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 shell 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 shell-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 shell 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 shell 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 shell had hit just above those quiet bodies, bringing the rafters and glass 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. Shells 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 shell, 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 shell 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 shell 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 shell 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 État 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.

"Your maternity hospital is a great idea," said Hinchcliffe to Hilda, during one of their talks. "I've cabled for five thousand pounds. That will start things."

The maternity hospital had been suggested to Hilda by the plight of little "Pervyse," and the hundreds of other babies of the war whom she had seen, and the hapless peasant mothers. Military hospitals are for soldiers, not for expectant mothers or orphaned children, and "Pervyse's" days of glory were ending. Reluctantly Colonel Depage, head surgeon of the hospital, had told Hilda that "Pervyse" must seek another home. His room was needed for fighting men.

"Let me have him christened first?" asked Hilda, and the great Belgian physician had consented.

It took her a week to make ready the ritual, but the morning came at last.

"To-day we christen 'Pervyse,'" said Hilda to the banker. "Will you come?"

"It isn't just my sort of speciality," replied Hinchcliffe, "but of course I'll come, if you'll show me the moves."

Hilda had chosen for the ceremony a village church on the Dixmude road. They put all the little necessary bundles of baby life into Hilda's ambulance--a packet of little shawls, and intimate clothing, a basket of things to eat, a great christening cake, frosted by Dunkirk's leading confectioner, a can of chocolate and of cream, candy baskets of sweets. It was Sunday--a cloudless, innocent day. They dodged through Furnes, the ruined, and came at length to the village of their quest. They entered the convent, and found a neat, clean room of eight beds. Two babies had arrived. Six mothers were expectant. In charge of the room was a red-cheeked, black-eyed nurse, a Flemish girl, motherly with the babies. Hilda dressed "Pervyse" in a long, white, immaculate dress, and a gossamer shawl, and pinned upon him a gold pin. She set the table in the convent--the cake in the center of the table, with one candle, and snowy blossoms from a plum tree.

Then the party started for the church: fifteen-year-old René, the Belgian boy scout who was to serve as godfather, giggling; the apple-cheeked Flemish girl carrying "Pervyse"; Hilda and Hinchcliffe closely following. They walked through the village street past laughing soldiers who called out, "Les Anglais!" They entered the church through the left door. A puff of damp air blew into their faces. In the chancel stood a stack of soldiers' bicycles. They kneeled and waited for the Curé. In the nave, old peasant women were nodding and dipping, and telling their beads. The nurse handed the baby to Hilda. René giggled. Three small children wandered near and stared. On the right side of the church was heaped a bundle of straw, and three rosy soldiers emerged who had been sleeping there. They winked at the pretty Flemish nurse. The church for them was a resting-place, between trench service.