Meanwhile Clair was shaken all through one day and night by increased artillery fire on the battle front. Never had Ruth Fielding heard the guns roll so terribly. It was as though a continuous thunderstorm shook the heavens and the earth.
The Germans tried to drive back the reserves behind the French trenches with the heaviest barrage fire thus far experienced along this sector, while they sent forward their shock troops to overcome the thin French line in the dugouts.
Here and there the Germans gained a footing in the front line of the French trenches; but always they were driven out again, or captured.
The return barrage from the French guns at last created such havoc among the German troops that what remained of the latter were forced back beyond their own front lines.
The casualties were frightful. News of the raging battle came in with every ambulance to the Clair Hospital. The field hospitals were overcrowded and the wounded were being taken immediately from the dressing stations behind the trenches to the evacuation hospitals, like this of Clair, before being operated upon.
This well-conducted institution, in which Ruth had been busy for so many weeks, became in a few hours a bustling, feverish place, with only half enough nurses and fewer doctors than were needed.
Ruth offered herself to the matron and was given charge of one ward for all of one night, while the surgeons and nurses battled in the operating room and in the dangerous wards, with the broken men who were brought in.
Ruth’s ward was a quiet one. She had already learned what to do in most small emergencies. Besides, these patients were, most of them, well on toward recovery, and they slept in spite of what was going on downstairs.
On this night Clair was astir and alight. The peril of an air raid was forgotten as the ambulances rolled in from the north and east. The soft roads became little better than quagmires for it had rained during a part of the day.
Occasionally Ruth went to an open window and looked down at the entrance to the hospital yard, where the lantern light danced upon the glistening cobblestones. Here the ambulances, one after another, halted, while the stretcher-bearers and guards said but little; all was in monotone. But the steady sound of human voices in dire pain could not be hushed.