The sheds were not ready to occupy; there were no expert carpenters to get them ready; it would be impossible to heat them; no order for the change had come from Headquarters—furthermore, a reason not mentioned, the sheds, being on higher ground, were more exposed to shell-fire. Dr. Girard-Mangin had had some experience with administrative inertia in her struggles for better housing for the poor; and long before the war she had known what it was to put herself voluntarily in danger—the scar from a bad tubercular infection on her hand is the honorable proof of that. She knew that the sick men would be better off in the barracks on higher ground. So she took them there. Just like that.
She was to have the entire care of the typhoid epidemic, and the only help which could be given her was to come from twenty men, absolutely unassorted—such a score as you would gather by walking down any street and picking up the first twenty men you met. There were several farm-laborers, a barber, an accountant, miscellaneous factory hands. The only person remotely approaching a nurse was a man who had had the training for a pharmacist, but as he had never been able to stay sober long enough to take his examinations, you may not be surprised that he was the least useful of them all.
These twenty casually selected human beings went unwillingly up the hill toward the barracks, ironic, mocking, lazy, indifferent, as human beings unelectrified by purpose are apt to be. But, although they did not know it, there marched at their head an iron will, a steel-like purpose, and an intelligence which was invincible. They took this to be but a smallish, youngish woman in uniform, and were all in great guffaws at the comic idea of being under her orders.
Of course, to begin with, she did not know one of her men from another, but she studied them closely as they worked, driven along by her direction, setting up the rough camp-stoves, stopping the worst of the holes in the walls, arranging the poor apologies for mattresses, and cutting off the tops of gasoline-cans for heating water—for our woman doctor was asked to take care of several hundred typhoid cases and was not provided with so much as a bowl that would hold water. Presently, as they worked, she noticed that there were but nineteen men there. All day she studied their faces, their bearing, what was written on them for the seeing eye to read. At night, at supper-time, there were twenty men. Those clear brown eyes swept around the circle and pounced on a mild-looking poilu innocently taking his soup with the others.
“Where have you been all day?” she asked him.
He fairly turned pale with astonishment, “Why, how did you—? I’ve been right here, working!” he tried to bluster her down.
“No, you haven’t. You haven’t been here since a quarter past ten this morning,” she assured him.
He hung his head a moment, then looked an ugly defiance. “Well, I’ve been in to Verdun to spend the day with a friend. What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to have you punished for disobeying an officer,” she said promptly, though so little military had been her beneficent life, that she had no more idea than you or I or any other woman would have of what punishment could be given in such a case.
“Officer’s orders!” said the man. “What officer?” All the men laughed.