"Then we will give them some wine!" Marta persisted.
"Not if we can prevent it! Not to start hemorrhages! The field doctors have brandy for use when advisable, and there is brandy with all the ambulances."
Clearly, volunteer service was not wanted. There was no room at the immediate front for Florence Nightingales in the modern machine of war.
"Then water?"
The major surgeon aimed to be patient to an earnest, attractive young woman.
"We have sterilized water—we have everything," he explained. "If we hadn't at this early stage I ought to be serving an apprenticeship in a village apothecary shop. Anything that means confusion, delay, unnecessary excitement is bad and unmerciful."
Marta was not yet at the end of her resources. The recollection of the dying private who had asked her mother for a rose in the last war flashed into mind.
"You haven't flowers! They won't do any harm, even if they aren't sterilized. The wounded like flowers, don't they? Don't you like flowers? Look! We've millions!"
"Yes, I do. They do. A good idea. Bring all the flowers you want to."
The major surgeon's smile to Marta was not altogether on account of her suggestion. "It ought to help anybody who was ever wounded anywhere in the world to have you give him a flower!" he was thinking.