Hilda brought her beautiful big ambulance to their door. There was room enough inside for them all to go together, with their bundles of household goods. And the mother smiled, saying:
"The shells will spare me. They will not hurt me."
"You refuse me to-day," replied Hilda, "but to-morrow I shall come again to take you away. I will take you to a new, safe home."
Very early the next morning, Hilda heard the sick crumble that meant the crunching of one more dwelling. She hurried to the door, and looked down the road. The place of the new birth had tumbled, and a thick smoke was rising from the wreck. She ran faster than she had ever run for her own safety. She came to the little home in a ruin of plaster and glass and brick-dust. Destruction, long overdue, had fallen out of the sunny blue sky on the group of reckless survivors in that doomed village. The soldiers were searching in the smoking litter for bodies. Big sister and little sister and brother were dead, and the little old grandmother. The mother, with shell wounds at her nursing breasts, was dying. Only "Pervyse" was living and to live. By a miracle of selection, he lay in the wreck of his house and the grave of his people—one foot half off, but otherwise a survivor of the shell that had fallen and burst inside his home.
Swiftly Hilda in her car, carried mother and child to La Panne to the great military hospital. The mother died in two hours on the operating table, and "Pervyse" was alone in a world at war.
The story and fame of him spread through the last city left to the Belgians. All the rest of their good land was trampled by the alien and marred by shell-fire and petrol. Here, alone in Flanders, there was still music in the streets, even if it was often a dead march. And here life was still normal and orderly. "Pervyse" found shelter in the military hospital where his mother had come only to die. He was the youngest wounded Belgian in all the wards. They put him in a private room with a famous English Colonel, and they called the two "Big Tom" and "Little Tom." The blue calico was changed for white things and "Pervyse" had a deep, soft cradle and more visitors than he cared to see.
The days of his danger and flight were evil days in Pervyse, for the guns grew busier and more deadly. There came a last day for the famous little dressing-station of the women. It began with trouble at the trenches. Two boys of nineteen years were brought in to the nurses. One of them was carrying the brains of a dead comrade on his pocket. A shell had burst in their trench, giving them head wounds. They died in the hall. They had served two days at the front. The women placed them on stretchers in the kitchen, and covered their faces, and left them in peace. A brief peace, for a shell found the kitchen, and the blue fumes of it puffed into the room where the women were sitting. The orderly and four soldier friends came running in, holding their eyes. When Hilda entered the kitchen, she saw that the shell had hit just above those quiet bodies, bringing the rafters and glass and brick upon them. A beam, from the rafter, had been driven into the breast of one of the boys—transfixing him as if by a lance. Shells were breaking in the road, the garden, the field and the near-by houses, every five seconds. In her own house, bricks were strewn about, and the windows smashed in. A large hole, in a shed back of the house, marked the flight of a shell, and behind it lay a dead man who had taken refuge there.
A Belgian had driven up their car a moment before and it was standing at the door. One soldier started to the car—a shell drove him back—a second dash and he made it, turned the car, and the women darted in. They sped down the road to the edge of the village, and here the nurses found shelter. Later that day the Colonel handed them a written order to evacuate Pervyse, lent them men to help, and gave them twenty minutes in which to pack and depart. They returned to their smashed house, and piled out their household goods. They left in the ambulance with all the soldiers cheering them. They were a sad little lot. So the loyal four months of service were ended under a few hours of gun-fire, and Hilda and her friends had to follow "Pervyse" to his new home.