SAILORS LIFTING A WOUNDED COMRADE INTO THE MOTOR-AMBULANCE.
When the Marin officers found out we were the same people that had worked with them at Melle five months before, they invited my wife and three other nurses to luncheon in a Nieuport cellar. Their eye brightens at sight of a woman, but she is as safe with them as with a cowboy or a Quaker. The guests were led down into a basement, an eighteen foot room, six feet high. The sailors had covered the floor and papered the walls with red carpet. A tiny oil stove added to the warmth of that blazing carpet. More than twenty officers and doctors crowded into the room, and took seats at the table, lighted by two lamps. There were a dozen plates of patisserie, a choice of tea, coffee, or chocolate, all hot, white and red wine, and then champagne. An orderly lifted in a little wooden yacht, bark-rigged, fourteen inches long, with white painted sails. A nurse spilled champagne over the tiny ship, till it was drenched, and christened. The chief doctor made a speech of thanks. Then the ship went around the table, and each guest wrote her name on the sails. The party climbed out into the garden, where the shells were going high overhead like snowballs. In amongst the blackened flowers, a 16-inch shell had left a hole of fifty feet diameter. One could have dropped two motor cars into the cavity.
Who but Marins would have devised a celebration for us on July 4? The commandant, the captain, and a brace of lieutenants opened eleven bottles of champagne in the Café du Sport at Coxyde in honor of our violation of neutrality. It was little enough we were doing for those men, but they were moved to graceful speech. We were hard put to it, because one had to tell them that much of the giving for a hundred years had been from France to us, and our showing in this war is hardly the equal of the aid they sent us when we were invaded by Hessian troops and a German king.
Marins whom we know have the swift gratitude of simple natures, not too highly civilized to show when they are pleased. After we had sent a batch of their wounded by hospital train from Adinkerke, the two sailors, who had helped us, invited my American friend and me into the estaminet across the road from the station, and bought us drinks for an hour. We had been good to their mates, so they wanted to be good to us.
When we lived in barraquement, just back of the admiral's house, our cook was a Marin with a knack at omelettes. If we had to work through the night, going into black Nieuport, and down the ten-mile road to Zuydcoote, returning weary at midnight, a brave supper was laid out for us of canned meats, wines, and jellies—all set with the touch of one who cared. It was no hasty, slapped-down affair. We were carrying his comrades, and he was helping us to do it.
It was an officer of a quite other regiment who, one time when we were off duty, asked us to carry him to his post in the Dunes. We made the run for him, and, as he jumped from the car, he offered us a franc. Marins pay back in friendship. The Red Cross station to which we reported, Poste de Secours des Marins, was conducted by Monsieur le Docteur Rolland, and Monsieur Le Doze. Our workers were standing guests at their officers' mess. The little sawed-off sailor in the Villa Marie where I was billetted made coffee for two of us each morning.
Our friends have the faults of young men, flushed with life. They are scornful of feeble folk, of men who grow tired, who think twice before dying. They laugh at middle age. The sentries amuse them, the elderly chaps who duck into their caves when a few shells are sailing overhead. They have no charity for frail nerves. They hate races who don't rally to a man when the enemy is hitting the trail. They must wait for age to gain pity, and the Bretons will never grow old. They are killed too fast. And yet, as soon as I say that, I remember their rough pity for their hurt comrades. They are as busy as a hospital nurse in laying a blanket and swinging the stretcher for one of their own who has been "pinked." They have a hovering concern. I have had twenty come to the ambulance to help shove in a "blessé," and say good-by to him, and wave to him as long as the road left him in their sight. The wounded man, unless his back bound him down, would lift his head from the stretcher, to give back their greetings. It was an eager exchange between the whole men and the injured one. They don't believe they can be broken till the thing comes, and there is curiosity to see just what has befallen one like themselves.
When it came my time to say good-by, my sailor friend, who had often stopped by my car to tell me that all was going well, ran over to share in the excitement. I told him I was leaving, and he gave me a smile of deep-understanding amusement. Tired so soon? That smile carried a live consciousness of untapped power, of the record he and his comrades had made. It showed a disregard of my personal feelings, of all adult human weakness. That was the picture I carried away from the Nieuport line—the smiling boy with his wounded arm, alert after his year of war, and more than a little scornful of one who had grown weary in conditions so prosperous for young men.