“Oh, don’t tell me it wouldn’t be prudent,” she broke out when Ruth tried to speak. “You never saw Andra. If you’d once known the look and the pride of him in his kilt, if you’d seem him taking the logs from a jamb, and the river frothing around him, if you’d known the mind and the will and the kind, true heart of him you’d know that there aren’t many men like him left in the world, and you’d know that the greatest mistake would
be that he shouldn’t get married—that there wouldn’t be any children to grow up like him. So no matter what happens, just so God sends him back to me alive. I’ll be waiting.
“That’s how most of the girls here feel, but a lot of their lads have been killed. The only hope for them is to have something to do that will make it seem worth while to live. A few of them want to train for nurses, thinking that by trying to ease other people’s suffering they can forget their own, but they wouldn’t all make nurses, and the life will soon go out of the place here if they all go. If you could plan something worth while for girls to do right here at home, and help the others who feel that they must get away, to find their right place when they do go, it would be worth everything.”
It happened when the “Next o’ Kin” club were making shirts and bandages at a farm house one day that a pedlar called selling lavender. The people had little use for lavender, but in the warmth of their hospitality they asked the stranger to stay for supper. He was embarrassed by the situation; evidently itinerant selling was new to him, and not congenial. It was also discovered that he was trying painfully to conceal the fact that his right arm hung limp and useless. Then someone noticed that he wore the badge of a discharged soldier, and if Prince Charlie had suddenly appeared in their midst his welcome could not have been more cordial.
He was the first person they had seen who had actually been “there,” and the young people, especially, pressed him with questions. Their imaginations had created thrilling pictures of kilted regiments charging over level fields with the sun flashing on their trappings and somewhere, always, the pipes playing; and those who fell would go down smiling. Was it like that, they begged, and had he seen any of their men?
The soldier considered and decided that they deserved to know the truth.
“You’ll be gettin’ some of them back one of these days,” he said, “and you wouldn’t want to be expectin’ too much of them for a while. I may not have seen any of your men, but I’ve seen men of the best picked regiments in the army, men who had been there long enough to be hardened to it if that were possible, and I’ve seen them loaded on to the stretchers cryin’ like children. You see it’s all so different, you just don’t get it here at all.
“There was one chap, a sort of leader and general favorite in our crowd. He had been a champion athlete at college and his face would have made a painting of a young Greek god look like a poor copy. They carried him back to the dressing-station one day and sent home a telegram saying that he was wounded in the face. The little girl from home wrote back that he
would be all the more handsome to her with a scar that told of sacrifice and bravery, and the dear knows what else, but she didn’t know just what it was. For the rest of his life he’ll keep the lower part of his face covered with a black cloth. The question is just how the girl will feel about it after the first shock or the first romantic phase of the incident has passed.”
The next day Ruth went into another community. It was a land flowing with milk and honey and humming with automobiles, and except as a live topic of conversation, the war was something apart.