I mentioned this as a personal recommendation; the real nurses smiled. But they accepted my services as a probationer, strong and willing, and glad to do what she was told, even to scrub floors with disinfectant fluid.
"You'll spoil you hands," said Milly.
I laughed.
Almost at once after this began the bombardment of the forts at Liége; and all day long and most of the night we were deafened with the boom of great guns across the river. It was a relief to be allowed to watch through the dark hours beside soldiers whose wounds were not serious enough to need expert care that I could not give. Even if I had been in bed I should not have slept. I felt as if my brain were part of the battlefield where armies marched and fought. My heartbeats were the drums. We grew used to the firing of cannon. It seemed a part of everyday life. It was hard to remember after the first that each "boom!" meant lives ended in violence. Perhaps if we had remembered we should have gone mad.
Suddenly, on the third day, just at dawn, came a new sound, a great whirring like a thousand racing automobiles, and then two loud explosions, one after the other, different from the roar of cannon or the shots from the field guns that night at El Paso. The whole building shook as if it must fall, and wounded men who had slept restlessly through the thunder from the forts waked with a wild start. My charge, a Belgian boy of nineteen whose arms had been amputated, shivered and then relapsed into stoical calm as the house ceased to shake. "Zeppelin," he said, in a quiet voice. "They have dropped bombs."
It seemed that two must have fallen and burst close by, the noise had been so ear-shattering. Up from the street below our windows came a clamour of voices, shrill and sharp, which cut through the constant whirr of the giant motor. Near the head of the bed was an open window, and mechanically, rather than of my own free will, I leaned far out, as some of the professional nurses were leaning from other windows.
"You might get a bomb on your head," said my soldier, in his tired voice. But I did not draw back. I was surprised to find that I was not afraid. It seemed just then ridiculous, puny, to care about one's self. I was awe-struck rather than terrified, realizing with a solemnity I had never known that the next minute might be the last on earth for all of us in that dimly lit room of narrow beds.
The sky was faintly gray with coming dawn. I looked up, up into the pale dome, seeking with my eyes the great bird of evil that had laid its eggs of death. There it was, immensely high above the black, shadowy roofs and steeples of the hill and plain; a sinister shape, like all the German sausages in the world rolled into one; and hanging from it cars full of men reduced to the size of beetles by that great height.
The thing was almost directly overhead as I looked up, and it seemed that if it dropped a parting bomb as it sailed our poor little hospital must be struck. Yet I continued to stare, fascinated. Life and death were twin brother and sister, equally terrible and splendid.
"I wish I could have seen Eagle just once again," I heard myself thinking, as one hears the ticking of a watch under a pillow. But I felt a strange, throbbing eagerness to know quickly the great secret of what comes next after this world, with its seeming muddle of injustice and disappointment, its joys and broken aspirations. "Why! it was like this with me when we had our accident in the Golden Eagle!" I thought. And even as the remembrance flitted ghostlike through my brain, I saw tearing through the sky, far above the big bulk of the Zeppelin, a monoplane etched in black against the light of dawn.