XXII
FLOWERS FOR THE WOUNDED
Was there nothing for Marta to do? Could she only look on in a fever of restlessness while action roared around her? On the way from the tower to the house the sight of several automobile ambulances in the road at the foot of the garden stilled the throbs of distraction in her temples with an answer. The wounded! They were already coming in from the field. She hurried down the terrace steps. The major surgeon in charge, surprised to find any woman in the vicinity, was about to tell her so automatically; then, in view of her intensity, he waited for her to speak.
"You will let us do something for them?" Marta asked. "We will make them some hot soup."
He was immediately businesslike. No less than Dellarme or Fracasse or Lanstron or Westerling, he had been preparing throughout his professional career for this hour. The detail of caring for the men who were down had been worked out no less systematically than that of wounding them.
"Thank you, no! We don't want to waste time," he replied. "We must get them away with all speed so that the ambulances may return promptly. It's only a fifteen-minute run to the hospital, where every comfort and appliance are ready and where they will be given the right things to eat."
"Then we will give them some wine!" Marta persisted.
"Not if we can prevent it! Not to start hemorrhages! The field doctors have brandy for use when advisable, and there is brandy with all the ambulances."
Clearly, volunteer service was not wanted. There was no room at the immediate front for Florence Nightingales in the modern machine of war.
"Then water?"
The major surgeon aimed to be patient to an earnest, attractive young woman.
"We have sterilized water—we have everything," he explained. "If we hadn't at this early stage I ought to be serving an apprenticeship in a village apothecary shop. Anything that means confusion, delay, unnecessary excitement is bad and unmerciful."
Marta was not yet at the end of her resources. The recollection of the dying private who had asked her mother for a rose in the last war flashed into mind.
"You haven't flowers! They won't do any harm, even if they aren't sterilized. The wounded like flowers, don't they? Don't you like flowers? Look! We've millions!"
"Yes, I do. They do. A good idea. Bring all the flowers you want to."
The major surgeon's smile to Marta was not altogether on account of her suggestion. "It ought to help anybody who was ever wounded anywhere in the world to have you give him a flower!" he was thinking.
She ran for an armful of blossoms and was back before the arrival of the first wounded man who preceded the stretchers on foot. He was holding up a hand bound in a white first-aid bandage which had a red spot in the centre. Those hit in hand or arm, if the surgeon's glance justified it, were sent on up the road to a point a mile distant, where transportation in requisitioned vehicles was provided. These men were triumphant in their cheerfulness. They were alive; they had done their duty, and they had the proof of it in the coming souvenirs of scars.
Some of the forms on stretchers had peaceful faces in unconsciousness of their condition. Others had a look of wonder, of pain, of apprehension in their consciousness that death might be near. The single word "Shrapnel!" by a hospital-corps corporal told the story of crushed or lacerated features, in explanation of a white cloth covering a head with body uninjured.
Feller, strolling out into the garden under the spell of watching shell bursts, saw what Marta was doing. With the same feeling of relief at opportunity for action that she had felt, he hastened to assist her, bringing flowers by the basketful and pausing to watch her distribute them—watching her rather than the wounded and enjoying incidental thrills at examples of the efficiency of artillery fire.
"The guns—the guns are going to play a great part!" he thought. "These rapid-firers will recover all the artillery's prestige of Napoleon's time!"
Many of the wounded themselves looked at Marta even more than at the flowers. It was good to see the face of a woman, her eyes limpid with sympathy, and it was not what she said but the way she spoke that brought smiles in response to hers. For she was no solemn ministering angel, but high-spirited, cheery, of the sort that the major surgeon would have chosen to distribute flowers to the men. Every remark of the victims of war made its distinct and indelible impression on the gelatine of her mind.
"I like my blue aster better than that yellow weed of yours, Tom!"
"You didn't know Ed Schmidt got it? Yes, he was right next me in the line."
"Say, did you notice Dellarme's smile? It was wonderful."
"And old Bert Stransky! I heard him whistling the wedding march as he fired."
"Miss, I'll keep this flower forever!"
"They say Billy Lister will live—his cheek was shot away!"
"Once we got going I didn't mind. It seemed as if I'd been fighting for years!"
"Hole no bigger than a lead-pencil. I'll be back in a week!"
"Yes; don't these little bullets make neat little holes?"
"We certainly gave them a surprise when they came up the hill! I wonder if we missed the fellow that jumped into the shell crater!"
"Our company got it worst!"
"Not any worse than ours, I'll wager!"
"Oh—oh—can't you go easier? Oh-h-h—" the groan ending in a clenching of the teeth.
"Hello, Jake! You here, too, and going in my automobile? And we've both got lower berths!"
"Sh-h! That poor chap's dying!"
Worst of all to Marta was the case of a shrapnel fracture of the cranium, with the resulting delirium, in which the sufferer's incoherence included memories of childhood scenes, moments on the firing-line, calls for his mother, and prayers to be put out of misery. A prod of the hypodermic from the major surgeon, and "On the operating-table in fifteen minutes" was the answer to Marta's question if the poor fellow would live.
Until dark, in groups, at intervals, and again singly, the wounded were coming in from a brigade front in the region where the rifles were crackling and the shrapnel clouds were hanging prettily over the hills; and stretchers were being slipped into place in the ambulances, while Marta kept at her post.
"We shan't have much more to do at this station," said the major surgeon when a plodding section of infantry in retreat arrived.