Although General Gordon was stationed with the Fifth Army Headquarters in Coblenz, where already, a month after the armistice, American troops had taken possession of houses in the German city and were preparing for their long stay in the occupied territory, Lucy herself was still on duty elsewhere. With the end of the fighting, need for war workers of all sorts had not grown less. Mrs. Gordon could not yet leave her hospital at Cannes, and Lucy had been urged to keep on as nurse’s aide with an insistence that could not but fill her with honest pride and satisfaction. The army surgeons spoke to her of the increasing need of nurses among the convalescents, and Miss Pearse frankly begged Lucy not to abandon her.
“You can go to Coblenz in the spring, Lucy dear,” the young nurse persuaded, when new plans and changes of base occupied every mind in the joyful week after the armistice. “We have to garrison Coblenz for fifteen years, they say, so your father will probably be there a good while. But perhaps he won’t,” she added, smiling at Lucy’s face, grown disconsolate at her words. “Anyway, while you’re over here I know you’d sooner be helping. There’s almost more to do than ever. The men have been rather let down by the war’s end and all the delays following. They don’t know what to do with themselves, especially the wounded who are slow in getting well. We’ve got to give them a Christmas that will stifle their homesickness a little. And I can’t half work without you, Lucy. I’m so used to having my little aide to call on. You’ll stay, won’t you?”
This was not the sort of persuasion Lucy could resist, when her heart was already in the work that she had learned in such a hard school of suffering and anxiety. She eagerly consented to follow Miss Pearse wherever her father would allow her to go, which ended by being a little convalescent hospital outside the village of Badheim, ten miles west of Coblenz on the banks of the Moselle. Cold breezes from the two rivers swept it, and the air was pure and sweet with the odor of pine. After the shell-torn villages of France, Badheim hospital, as Miss Pearse described it, seemed lovely and inviting to Lucy in its woodland stillness. Yet something, she felt, would keep her from yielding to its peaceful spell: it was a part of Germany. It was unspoiled because France was desolate. She could not forget this long enough to look about her at any German landscape with untroubled eyes.
Even now, walking with Larry along the Rhine, she watched the smooth flow of the river and looked across at the vineyard-clad slopes and at the great old fortress towering opposite Coblenz with coolly critical gaze. All at once she turned to Larry, with sudden recollection that this was her last day of freedom and perhaps her last chance in weeks of talking with Bob’s friend, to ask longingly:
“Larry, can’t you tell me anything more of what Bob is doing at Archangel? He doesn’t write much about his work, and the letters are so slow. I know it’s hard up there. And they don’t get ahead. The Bolsheviki are strong.”
“Our force is hardly of a size to accomplish much. It ought to be enough men or none,” declared Larry, with the troubled, puzzled look that sometimes came over his face, making him look extraordinarily sober and thoughtful by contrast with his usual cool cheerfulness. “But don’t worry too much about Bob,” he added, putting aside the doubts which had made him speak so earnestly. “He’s doing scouting work. He’s far safer than he was on the German front. The cold is the disagreeable part.”
“I know. I’ve knitted him everything I thought he could pile on. He doesn’t say much about it, but I looked up Archangel on the map and, Larry, it’s near the North Pole.”
“Not quite, but I won’t say it’s a pleasant climate. Perhaps they won’t stay there much longer.”
“Well, I thought on Armistice Day that it was over, really over,—the war, I mean. But here it seems to be tailing out in every direction.”
“Yes, it has rather a nasty way of refusing to be finished,” Larry agreed, looking around him as he spoke at the passers-by, for they were now re-entering the town. “To judge by their manner these Boches seem to think it’s quite over and that we’re friends again. Yet some of them, I’m sure, are very far from feeling that way.”