"Yes, sir. They are passing the President's message along the line. It looks as if they mean business."
May Margaret had moved further back into the darkness of the dugout. She was breathing quickly, panting like a thirsty dog. She dropped on her knees by an old packing-case in the corner.
"Thank God. Thank God," she repeated, with her eyes shut. Then the tears came, and her whole body shook.
A hand touched her shoulder. She rose to her feet and saw the bewildered face of Major Hilton, peering again at her own.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's the first time I've done it since I was a kid; but I've been hoping for this ever since the beginning. It's my country, you see."
"I've just been looking at the President's message," said Hilton. "I'm an Englishman, but—if a democracy can discipline itself—I'm not sure that yours won't be the greatest country in the world. I suppose it must be, or the Lord wouldn't have entrusted so much to you. He gave you the best that we ever had to give, and that was our Englishman, George Washington; and the best thing that George Washington ever did, was to fight the German King and his twenty thousand Hessians. Eh, what?"
It was a little after dusk when the unexpected happened. There had been a lull in the bombardment; and, on Major Hilton's advice, May Margaret was resting in the dugout in readiness for the long wakeful night of the trenches.
She lay there, dazed as from shell-shock by the account of Brian's death; and the declaration of war from her own country had burst upon her with an equal violence, leaving her stunned in a kind of "No Man's Land," a desolate hell, somewhere between despair and triumph. Her world had broken up. Her mind was no longer her own. Her thoughts were helpless things between enormous conflicting forces; and, as if to escape from their rending clutches, as if to cling to the present reality, she whispered to herself the words of the wounded soldier at Charing Cross station: "If you meet him, give him hell for me! Give him hell for me." It seemed as if it were Brian himself speaking. Once, with a swift sense of horror, catching herself upon the verge of insanity, she found that her imagination was furtively beginning to picture his last agony, and she stopped it, screwing her face up, like a child pulling faces at a nightmare, and making inarticulate sounds to drive it away.
Of one thing she was quite certain now. She did not wish to live any longer in a world where these things were done. She meant, by hook or by crook, to get to the dangerous bit of the trench, where our men were only separated by six yards from the enemy, and to stay there until she was killed. Even if she couldn't throw bombs herself, she supposed that she could hand them up to others. And any thought that conflicted with this idea she suppressed, automatically, with her monotonous echo of the wounded soldier, "Give them hell for me."
But she was spared any further trouble about the execution of her plans; and she knew, at once, that she had come to the end of her quest, when she heard the quick sharp cries of warning outside.