Chapter V

"Here is the hard paradox: war ... truly devilish, bestial, senseless thing, produces in masses--as peace distinctly does not produce them--brothers and sisters to Christ."--G. B. DAWAR.

Wynchcombe Friars without Mark was no place to tarry in; but there seemed no end to the delays; and Keith turned even these to good account by teaching Sheila to drive the Forsyth-Macnair car. Two drivers with one orderly would get through twice the work.

It was near the middle of October when, at last, they found themselves speeding towards Folkestone. Keith, who had laid aside philosophy "for the duration of the war," delighted in his own small ark of salvation as a Captain delights in his ship. From "stem to stern" she was as perfect as skill and money could make her; fitted up with four stretchers and bedding; crammed to the limit of her capacity with first aid appliances and a minimum of luggage.

Here and there autumn had laid a fiery finger on the woods. Birches and elms were tipped with gold. Otherwise the October sun riding in a cloudless heaven suggested high summer. Mark had been gone nearly two weeks. Two brief cheerful letters assured his mother he was alive and well. Till she could see him again, those simple facts were all that vitally concerned herself; though pessimists prophesied invasion by Zeppelin and transport; and away over there--unseen, yet acutely felt--Belgium continued her heroic stand against the all-devouring, all-defiling German Army.

The fall of Antwerp, pronounced impregnable, had resounded through Europe like the knell of doom. For a time, even the bravest were shaken with dismay and the stream of refugees increased daily. The streets of Folkestone overflowed with that pitiful flotsam of wrecked cities. Some wept; some cursed; some prayed; but the prevailing expression was a terrible stunned indifference, as though shock on shock had hammered them into automata that could move and eat and sleep, but could no longer feel.

In Boulogne--when they reached it--the flotsam of wrecked battalions was more in evidence. Things were still primitive here as regards organisation: but already the place was an English colony. The British Red Cross Society was beginning to make things move and owners of private cars were doing splendid service. To these were now added the unrelated trio from Wynchcombe Friars. But their first objective was Rouen, where a young Stuart nephew lay badly wounded, craving for the sight of a face from home. His invalid mother could not get to him; so Lady Forsyth went in her stead, only to find on arrival that the boy had been dead an hour. For the sake of that faraway mother she asked to see him, though privately she dreaded the ordeal. She was aware, suddenly, of a very unheroic shrinking from close contact with the awful actualities of war. But that shrinking in no way affected her zeal for the work in hand.

News that a train-load of casualties was expected that evening sent them full speed to the station; but it was dusk when they arrived to find the process of unloading begun. At the entrance, a group of Red Cross officials stood talking and laughing, hardened by habit to the painful scene. As the car drew up they crowded round, admiring it and questioning Macnair, while tragic burdens were being carried past them in the half light.

Helen, too overwrought to make allowances, wondered how Keith had the patience to answer them.

Presently, her attention was caught by a number of black shadows, like wheelbarrows abnormally large and high.

"What are those?" she asked a porter, and discovered that they were severely wounded men on wheeled stretchers either too brave or too exhausted to utter a sound of complaint.

At that she could restrain herself no longer.

"Keith," she exclaimed, flagrantly interrupting a Medical Authority with a passion for cars. "Why are those unfortunate men kept hanging about in this noisy place? Can't we get four of them away?"

But Medical Authority checked her impatience in a tone of mild reproof.

"Those fellows are all right where they are, Lady Forsyth," he said. "They're not fit to be moved off their stretchers. So we're waiting for the trams. If you like to back into the station, you may pick up some milder cases who'll be glad of a lift."

They backed in accordingly and picked up two maimed men and a remarkably cheerful subaltern with his left arm in a sling and a bandage across one eye. As they passed out, Keith offered to return for another load; and to Helen's disgust, the offer was politely declined.

By the time they reached the field hospital--a collection of marquees, fitted up with electric light--it was nearly ten o'clock.

"Quite early; but we don't seem to be _wanted_; so I suppose we must go to bed," Helen remarked with doleful emphasis, as they re-settled the car. "I don't know what you think about it, Keith. _I_ feel distinctly snubbed. Four out of three hundred! What's that?"

"A beginning--and no bad one!" Keith answered placidly, filling his pipe. "Fanshawe says if we report ourselves at Boulogne we shall get all the work we want. There's heavy fighting on the north. A big battle developing for Ypres and Calais."

To Boulogne they returned accordingly: and had no cause this time to feel either snubbed or superfluous. There was still a famine of cars at the Base and the wounded were arriving in thousands: their bodies mangled and mutilated; their spirits, in the main, unquenched.

Macnair and his party drove up to their Hotel at noon: and their greeting from the Red Cross Authority was very much to the point.

"All available cars wanted immediately at the Gare Maritime. Better get some lunch first."

That lunch was of the briefest. Keith dumped their luggage in the hall without so much as asking if there were rooms to be had. Helen did not even open the coveted letter from Mark, till they were back in the motor, speeding towards the bare unsheltered Gare, where impromptu and comfortless hospital trains debouched their tragic loads. Mercifully the sun of that miraculous autumn still shone unclouded; and, by the time autumn gave place to the wettest winter in decades, better arrangements had been made.

All that afternoon they worked, unceasingly, and late into the night. Back and forth, back and forth between station and hospital; jolting inevitably over railway lines, and a strip of merciless cobble pavement that, for men with shattered limbs, hurriedly dressed, involved several minutes of excruciating agony.

"Keith, couldn't they possibly take up that cruel bit of pave?" Helen pleaded after their seventh journey with three men at death's door. "Even a raw road would be better than those stones."

"I'll move heaven and earth to get it improved," he assured her, little guessing that he had pledged himself to a labour of Hercules.

By the time they could take breath and think about finding beds, they were all dead weary, sustained only by the knowledge that they had given their mite of service to the utmost of their power. In Mark's letter, which Helen had scarcely found time to read, there was a sentence on this head that had haunted her brain throughout those strenuous hours.

"Oh Mums, if only the good casual folk at home could be made to see even the half of what we see in the way of wanton destruction, and calculated brutality, wherever the gentle German has left his trail, they'd possibly begin to realise the powers of evil we're up against in this war and things in general would march to a different tune. But they can't see. That's the trouble. And hearing about such things isn't the same at all. If we're ever going to win through hell to human conditions again it won't be merely by signing cheques and making speeches, but by the individual personal service of every man and woman in whatever capacity; and I'm proud to feel you three are giving it like Trojans. God bless you all!"

She stood gleaning a few more scraps under an electric light, when Keith came up to say he had secured a room for her and Sheila; and a friendly Irish doctor had offered him a bed in his hospital train.

"I'm in great luck with my two assistants," he added smiling down at her eager, tired face. "Sheila betters my expectation, which is saying a good deal. Her self-possession to-day astonished me. She'd have the nerve for advance ambulance work in the firing line, I do believe. But I'm glad we've got her safe here."

He glanced towards her where she sat at a writing-table scribbling a hurried letter to Mark in praise of their mutually beloved Mums. Then he went up and touched her shoulder.

"Good night, Sheila," he said. "Get to bed sharp, both of you. I'll call for you to-morrow."

"We'll be ready early," she answered looking up at him; and he discovered, to his surprise, that her eyes were swimming in tears.

There was a certain monotony about the days of unremitting work that followed; a monotony tinged with its own peculiar high lights and shadows; with beauty and terror, fortitude and anguish, the incoming and outgoing pulse-beat of life at the Base. Scarcely a day passed without some minor incident, some flash of human revelation that neither Keith nor his orderlies would forget while they lived.

For Helen--with every nerve responsive to the suffering around them--the strain of it all proved no light matter; yet, in retrospect she counted those terrible days as among the richest experiences of her life.

To her it was distracting that wounded men should suffer additional miseries from the fact that even in two and a half months of war it had been impossible to cope with all the complex needs of the situation. Hospitals were few and quite inadequate. The magnificent ambulance trains of later days were still in the workshops at home; while untiring men on the spot did the best they could with the high, comfortless passenger coaches of France. Even the more luxurious sleeping carriages were too cramped for the ingress and egress of badly wounded men: and when, at last, these were landed, like so many bales of goods, on the unsheltered platform of the Gare, shortage of ambulance cars and trained stretcher-bearers added the finishing touch to their nightmare journey. But soon after Keith's arrival the zeal and organisation of the British Red Cross began to make themselves felt, in this respect as in others. Every ambulance that could be raised in London was rushed across to Boulogne; till in a few days there were eighty of one kind or another plying between train and hospital and ship.

For all that, there was still need of superhuman exertion to cope, even inadequately with the terrible stream of wounded; the back wash as it were, from the Homeric struggle round Ypres. In that region, the Belgians were making their last desperate stand, and war-worn British Divisions,--haggard, sleepless, cruelly depleted--were still miraculously holding their own against Army Corps on Army Corps of fresh German troops heartened by an overwhelming superiority in guns and shells. There--during those awful days--whole battalions of the finest troops on earth practically ceased to exist; and thence came the main influx of comfortless, over-crowded trains.

Steadily the tale of wounded swelled, till it reached an average of two thousand a day. And what were eighty cars among so many? Little better than the five loaves and two small fishes in Galilee: and here was no hope of miraculous intervention. The outstanding miracle of that golden October--when England neither knew her peril nor the full cost of her salvation--was the superhuman fortitude of those that were broken on the wheel and the untiring energy of those who served them in the teeth of baffling conditions.

Day after day the open platform was thronged with men on stretchers in all stages of mental and bodily collapse; British, Indian, French, Belgian, German--brothers all, for the moment, in suffering if in nothing else. Some stared wildly and talked nonsense; some were apathetic; some incurably cheerful; though often their wounds had not been dressed for days.

The lack of trained stretcher-bearers was a serious difficulty till St. John's Ambulance Society came to the rescue. Porters, willing but unskilful, did what they could. Keith himself, and others like him, helped to carry scores of men. From early morning till near midnight the cars of rescue ran to and fro; but in spite of every effort there were unavoidable delays. Men died there on the stretchers, or in draughty cars, while red-tape regulations kept them waiting outside hospitals and ships. And that cruel strip of pavé remained unsmoothed, though Keith had pressed the point with unauthorised persistence. And Helen cursed--so far as her ladyhood permitted--every time they crossed it with patients in the last extremity.

The unceasing rush of work left small leisure for nightmares or even for anxiety; but the strain and pain of it was taxing her nerves to breaking-point. Always, as they drew near the familiar crowded station, there sprang the inevitable question: "Will it be Mark this time?" But though the passing days brought many from his regiment, Mark was not found among them.

As for Sheila, her sensitive spirit felt the test more acutely than either of the elders, who kept watchful eyes on her, were allowed to suspect. Only by clinging desperately to her childhood's code of courage could she save herself, at times, from the ignominy of collapse. It was sustaining, too, to feel that Keith trusted her, that Helen relied on her; and Mark's occasional letters--full of a brotherly tenderness that showed little in his speech--made it seem possible to win through anything without flinching visibly. The fact that she could face this inferno of pain and death and mental anguish without a sense of bitterness or rebellion was more of an asset than she knew. It was, in fact, the keystone of her character, the secret of her spiritual poise. For to accept, actively to accept, spells capacity to transcend; but that she had still to discover.

They had little time, any of them, for abstract or personal thought. The war, and its pressing demands on them constituted their life. Keith had secured a small private sitting-room, where they could enjoy an occasional evening of quiet and rest. But as work was seldom over till near eleven, such oases were rare indeed. At times their heads felt stunned with the eternal rattling to and fro, their hearts numbed by contact with the awful harvest of a modern battlefield. But on the whole they loved their work, and would not have been otherwhere for a kingdom.

They grew skilled in the art of talking the men's minds away from their sufferings: and Sheila--"Mouse" though she was--showed so notable a gift for this form of spiritual healing, that Lady Forsyth finally christened her "Queen of the Poor Things." Some mother-quality in her touch and tone seemed to go straight to their hearts. Men who left the station groaning and clenching their teeth, to keep the curses back, would surprisingly soon be conjured into recounting their adventures, or better still, talking of wives and children at home.

Keith himself confessed that he had never properly appreciated the British Tommy till he carried him wounded; and Helen lost her heart a dozen times over. More than once when they chanced upon men shattered and bandaged past human recognition, she came very near losing her head: but only once did she disgrace herself by fainting outright.

On that occasion, Keith carried her straight back to their Hotel, laid her on the sofa and stayed by her till she was sufficiently recovered to feel very much ashamed of herself.

"Promise I won't do it again," she assured him as he stood leaning over her.

"No, that you certainly won't," he said sternly. "If ever you do, I shall pack you straight off home. To-night, for a punishment, you'll go early to bed. Sheila will be quite safe with me."

Argument and rebellion were useless. Moreover, she was honestly exhausted; and before ten o'clock she was sound asleep.

But even weariness could not break the habit of short rest; and by one of the morning she was amazingly wide awake.

Some distant sound had roused her, and now it drew nearer:--footsteps and voices; men cheering and singing of "La Gloire" and "La Mort." Nearer still they came, tramping along the pavement, till they were almost under her open window.

Then she was aware of a discordant note in that gallant chorus. One voice, raised in terror and remonstrance, was trying to dominate those other voices that were obviously shouting it down.

"J'ai peur! Mon Dieu, camarades, j'ai peur!"

The words reached her distinctly now. But the rest, unheeding, sang louder than ever of "la mort" and "la gloire."

Possibly they were sorry for him. The coward is the unhappiest of men. Yet he too being "enfant de la patrie" must go, even as others went: and Helen Forsyth, hearing him go, found the tears streaming down her face--not for the coercion of one reluctant citizen, but for the unending horror and misery of it all: the fear and the anguish and the calculated cruelty that were so infinitely worse than death.

Sheila, sleeping the profound sleep of healthily exhausted youth, stirred not an eyelash even when the noise was at its height. But, for Helen, that pitiful interlude had put an end to rest; had opened the door to nightmare memories and her own most private fears.

Since the long letter from Mark, that had greeted her on arrival, there had been one barren field postcard: and even that was ten days old.

And away there, in the trenches, the struggle seemed to wax fiercer every hour....

The blank parallelogram of her window gleamed pale grey before, in spite of herself, she fell asleep.