The girl nodded yes. She took the notes on a bit of scrap paper mechanically; for all the time her eyes were on the face of the man. All the time save once—when they fell upon the smooth counterpane of his bed, then returned to the man's face once again. She knew that he was lying, and because she was new, just come over from America—she did not know that the Red Cross held one particular lie to be both glorified and sanctified—she folded up the memorandum, told the wounded man that she would write the letter—and went out.
She went straight to the records room of the place. Yes, it was true. Her suspicions as to the unnatural smoothness of that counterpane were confirmed there. The man had had shrapnel in both legs, but that was not all. Both had been amputated—well above the knees.
The Red Cross girl went back to him, her eyes blazing with anger. Her anger all but overcame her natural tenderness.
"I can't, I can't," she expostulated. "I can't send that letter."
"Why can't you?" he coolly replied.
She faced him with the truth.
"Well, what of it?" said he. "If I do get home, I'll get home by Christmas—and that will be time enough for her to know the truth. She'll be ready for it, then. But—" he lowered his voice almost to a whisper—"I'm not going to get home. The doctor's told me that, but he don't have to tell me; I know it. And if I don't get home she'll never be the wiser——. You write that letter, just as I told it to you."
Here was by far the saddest phase of the Red Cross work for our soldier boys—and almost the most important. It was one thing for the girl in the steel-gray uniform, with the little crimson crosses affixed to her shoulders, to play and make merry with the wounded men who were getting well; but it was a different and vastly more difficult part of the job to play fair, let alone make merry, with those who were not going to get well; who, at the best, were to shuffle through the rest of their lives maimed or crippled or blind. Yet what an essential part of the big job all that was! And how our girls—moved by those great fountains of human love and sympathy and tenderness that seemingly spring forever in women's hearts, rose to this supreme test over there! And after they had so arisen how trivial seemed the mere handing out of sandwiches or coffee or cigarettes! This was the real touch of war—the touch supreme. After it, all others seemed almost as nothing.