The nurses had slaved for hours. Every patient had been carefully bathed, his hands and face were spotlessly clean, his wounds were freshly dressed and he was wrapped up so snugly that the loving eye of a mother could have found no fault.
The ambulances were at the door once more—but on a different mission this time—and the boys, all smiles and chatter, were carried out upon their stretchers or clambered gleefully down the stairs. Nurses, officers and men were at the door saying good-bye to their patients. Murmured words of thanks or gratitude on the one hand, and warmest well wishes on the other were exchanged, and at last, with much waving of caps and handkerchiefs, the convoy of ambulances started for the steamer at Boulogne, carrying the happy, care-free loads of boys another stage toward home, or, in Tommy's own vernacular—toward "Blighty."
CHAPTER XII
It was a wild fight the day the Germans broke through at Givenchy; and the Bosches were wilder still when, finding themselves in the town, they were in considerable doubt what to do with it. Of course it would have been perfectly all right if the rest of their corps had followed on and backed up the intrepid stormers. But the enemy had reckoned without his host, and Tommy decided that such visitors should be given a warm reception. In fact, they went so far in their efforts at hospitality that they entirely surrounded their guests and closed the breech behind them, in order that they might receive no "draft" from the rear.
Having thus graciously encompassed them, Tommy proceeded to kill them with kindness, rifles, bayonets and hand grenades. The Germans, greatly bewildered by this flattering reception, would fain have rested on the laurels already won. Tommy, however, insisted on entertaining them still further, and at last, despairing of ever satisfying such a busy host, the visitors threw down their arms and capitulated.
When we opened the doors of the Ambulance Train at Etaples and, instead of the customary khaki, saw the drab coats and the red-banded skull caps, we were almost as surprised as the Germans had been the day before.
They were a sorry-looking lot. Dazed and bewildered by their astonishing defeat, they looked like men still under the influence of a narcotic. As they got slowly down from the coaches, their heads or arms in bandages, they looked sick—very sick indeed; but it was not so much with an illness of the body as an illness of the mind. They stood together, silent and sullen, seeming to expect ill-treatment at our hands.
GERMAN WOUNDED
There is so little of the time "sport" in the German composition that they cannot understand that to the British war is still a game and, when the contest is over, ill-feeling ceases. We bore no more enmity toward these hapless victims of a malevolent militarism than as if they had been helpless waifs cast upon our charity. This is not a matter for self-praise; it is the inevitable result of a wholesome and broad-minded upbringing. God knows these defeated men looked sufficiently depressed and mean without our adding to their brimming cup of sorrow!