The women had been sitting quite peacefully after supper. A jerk at the bell cord, a tiny tinkle, and Mrs. Bracher had answered the door. A big breathless civilian stood there. He said—
"Please, the Madame Doctor, quick. The baby is coming."
These astonishing peasants! Hilda could never get over her wonder at their stolidity, their endless patience, their matter-of-fact way of carrying on life under a cataclysm. They went on with their spading in the fields, while shrapnel was pinging. They trotted up and down a road that was pock-marked with shell-holes. They hung out their washings where machine-gun bullets could aerate them. The fierce, early weeks of shattering bombardment had sent the villagers scurrying for shelter to places farther to the west. And for a time, Pervyse had been occupied only by soldiers and the three nurses. But soon the civilians came trickling back. They were tired of strange quarters, and homesick for their own. There were now more than two hundred peasants in Pervyse—men, women and children. The children, regardless of shell fire, scoured the fields for shrapnel bullets and bits of shells. They brought their findings to the nurses, and received pieces of chocolate in return. There was a family of five children, in steps, who wore bright red hoods. They liked to come and be nursed. The women had from six to a dozen peasants a day, tinkling the bell for treatment. Some came out of curiosity. To these was fed castor-oil. One dose cured them. They came with every sort of ailment. A store-keeper, who kept on selling rock candy, had a heel that was "bad" from shrapnel. One mite of a boy had his right hand burned, and the wound continued to suppurate. He dabbled in ditch-water, and always returned to Hilda with the bandage very wet and dirty.
Here was their home—Belgium, flowering and happy, or Belgium, black and perishing. Still it is Belgium, the homeland. Why take on the ugly hazards of exile?
If your husband is ill and broken, you stay by him. He is your man. So with the land of your birth, the village where you are one with the soil. You stay and suffer, and meantime you live. Still you plant and plough, though the guns are loud in the night, and Les Bosches just over the meadow. And here was one of these women in the wrecked, charred village of Pervyse carrying on the great, natural process of life as unperturbed as if her home was in a valley of peace.
The three women ran over to a little house two hundred yards down the road. One wall of it was bullet-chipped, one room of it a wreck from a spent obus. But, for the rest, it was a livable little place, and here was gathered a Flemish family. The event was half over, as Mrs. Bracher, closely followed by Scotch and Hilda, rushed in. The mother, fully dressed, was lying on a wooden bed that fitted into an alcove. She was typically Flemish, of high cheek-bones and very red cheeks. The entire family was grouped about the bed—a boy of twelve years, a girl of nineteen, and a girl of three. Attending the case, was a little old woman, the grandmother, wearing a knitted knobby bonnet, sitting high on the top of her head and tied under her chin—a conical frame for her pert, dark eyes and firm mouth. She was a tiny woman, every detail of her in miniature, clearly defined, except the heavy, noisy wooden shoes. She carried in her personality an air of important indignation. With the confidence of a lifetime of obstetrical experience, she drew from her pocket a brown string, coarse and dirty, and tied up the newcomer's navel. It was little the nurses were allowed to help. Though a trained and certificated midwife, Mrs. Bracher was edged out of the ministration by the small, determined grandmother, who looked anger and scorn out of her little black eyes upon the three. She resented their coming. Antiseptic gauze and hot-water bottles were as alien as the Germans to her.
So "Pervyse" entered this world. Nothing could hold him back, neither shell nor bayonets. He had slipped through the net of death which men were so busily weaving. There he was, a matter of fact—a vital, lusty, shapeless fact. To that little creature was given the future, and he was stronger than the artillery. By all the laws, vibrations of fear ought to have passed into the tiny body. His consciousness, it would seem, must be a nest of horrors. Instead of that, his cry had the insistence of health. His solemnity was as abysmal as that of a child of peace.
When the girls visited "Pervyse" next morning, the grandmother was nursing him with sugar and water from a quart bottle. She had him dressed in dark blue calico. Thereafter twice a day they called upon him, and each time Hilda carried snowy linen, hoping to win the grandmother. But the old lady was firm, and "Pervyse" was to thrive, looking all the redder, inside blue calico. The mother was a good mother, sweet and constant. Very slowly, the nurses won her confidence and the grandmother's respect.
"Do come away," urged Hilda. "Let me take you all back to La Panne, where it is safer. Give 'Pervyse' his chance. It is senseless to live here in this shed under shell fire. Some day, the guns will get you, and then it will be too late."
But always they refused, mother, and brother, and big and little sister, and grandmother. The village was their place. The shed was their home.