We lifted him down from his swinging perch in the car. He was heavy at the shoulders to shift. The dead seem heavier than the quick. We stretched him at full length in the sticky mud of the gutter at the side of the road. He lay there, white face and wide eyes in the night, as if frozen in his pain. Soldiers, stumbling to their supper, brushed against his stiff body and then swerved when they saw the thing which they had touched. A group of doctors and officers moved away. Mud from the sloughing tires of the transports spattered him, but not enough to cover him. No one had time to give him his resting-place. We were too busy with the fresher shambles, and their incompleted products, to pause for a piece of work so finished as that cold corpse.
But no indignity of the roadway can long [withhold] him from his portion of peace, and the land that awakened his courage will receive him at last. There is more companionship under the ground than above it for one who has been gallant against odds.
VII
THE AMERICAN
"Atrocities, rubbish!" said the man. "A few drunken soldiers, yes. Every war has had them. But that's nothing. They're all a bunch of crazy children, both sides, and pretty soon they'll quiet down. In the meantime," he added with a smile, "we take the profits—some of us, that is."
"Is that all the war means to you?" asked Hilda.
"Yes, and to any sensible person," replied he. "Why do you want to go and get yourself mixed up in it? An American belongs out of it. Go and work in a settlement at home and let the foreign countries stew in their own juice."
"Belgium doesn't seem like a foreign country to me," returned the girl. "You see, I know the people. I know young Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville and Commandant Gilson, with the wound on his face, and the boys that come into the Flandria Hospital with their fingers shot away. They are like members of my family. They did something for me."
"How do you make that out?"