Red and Black

by Grace S. Richmond

Suddenly the distant sky-line burst into flame before her eyes. She had seen it before, that sky-line, during the months since she had come to the Field Hospital, but always before it had been when she was too busy to stop to look at it. Now, in the brief breathing space, she was at leisure to study it in all its sinister significance, and to listen to the distant thunder of the guns.

He might not be there—she was very sure he was not, for the returning wounded brought fairly accurate reports of what divisions were engaged in the fighting in this sector. But somewhere—somewhere—on that long, bending line, stretching over so many long miles, and now grown so thin and in many places so dangerously weak compared with the ever augmenting enemy forces—somewhere there he might be. According to that persistent rumour the American troops who had been rushed forward were at a point less than twenty miles away. Whatever happened, however, none of them would come through this particular Field Hospital, and it might be very long before she would know definitely how near Black had been to actual danger.

She looked at her little service watch—it was just past four. She must go back: it would not be long now before the ambulances would be rushing in with the fresh wounded sent back from that angry sky-line. The stretcher-bearers would be setting their woeful burdens down before her, and all she had to give must be theirs, for the hour.

For a moment she closed her eyes. She still held the letter in her hand; she lifted it and laid her cheek against it; then she pressed it to her lips.

“Oh, wherever you are,” she breathed, “I think you need me. I think you are thinking of me. But whether you are or not—I’m there.—Oh, Robert Black—I’m there!”

In a narrow, winding, muddy ditch—which was all it was, though it went by another name—with short, ladder-like places for the ascent of its sides here and there, Robert Black was waiting, with a detachment of his men, for a certain hour, minute and second previously fixed by orders received in the early evening. He was at a crisis in his experience which he had known would come some day, but it had been long delayed. Now it was at hand. These men with whom he had been stationed, throughout their voyage overseas, their foreign training, and their slow and tedious progress toward the French Front, were about to receive their first real test. At that fixed early morning hour they were going for the first time “over the top.”

By now Black knew most of them pretty well. In the beginning they had received him cautiously, watching him closely, as a man who comes to a regiment with a cross on his collar is bound to be watched. They hadn’t particularly liked their former chaplain, whose place Black had taken at almost the last hour before they sailed. This man had never been able to get very near to them, though he had tried conscientiously and persistently to do so. They weren’t exactly prejudiced against chaplains—they supposed they were somehow necessary and unavoidable adjuncts of military service—but they didn’t see so very much use in having them at all. So when Black came they had looked him over curiously and not without a certain amount of prejudgment.

The voyage over had been a rough one; a large proportion of the men had been seasick. Black, who had crossed the Atlantic many times on those trips back home to see his mother, was a first-rate sailor, and he had had his first chance with his men during those long days of storm and wet and dark discomfort. He had made the most of it, though he had taken care not to overdo the effort to bring cheer to those who if not seasick were mostly homesick, whether they succeeded in concealing it or not. He had gone about quietly but efficiently, and the impression he had given had been that of one who had cast in his lot with his regiment for better or for worse, though he wasn’t making any fuss about it.

When they had reached the other side and gone into camp, they soon discovered that the first impression they had had of their chaplain held; that he meant to share and share alike with them whatever fell to their lot. Though he rated as captain and had therefore the right to associate with the officers and to mess with them, he didn’t seem to be spending much time at it. He was very good friends with those in authority, who seemed to like him; but he apparently cared more about making friends with the private in the ranks than with the Major, or the Colonel commanding. He was not a joke-maker; he didn’t slap the boys on the shoulder nor shout at them; but he carried about with him an atmosphere of good cheer of a quiet sort. And when, now and then, it came to a contest of wits, and somebody tried to put the chaplain in a corner, he was sure to find his way out with a quick and clever retort which brought the laugh without making things too uncomfortable for the cornerer—unless he deserved it, in which case he was pretty sure to wish he hadn’t spoken.

As to preaching—they crowded to hear him, after the first tentative experiment. The same unescapable logic, the same clear and challenging appeal, the same unafraid plain-speaking which had won Redfield Pepper Burns won these men—who were only boys after all. When it came to the matter of preaching they were keen and merciless critics. They didn’t want to be talked down to; they didn’t like to be beguiled into listening with song and dance; they wanted a man if he were going to speak to them at all to do it without mincing, or setting traps for their attention. They wanted him to look like a man and act like a man—and unequivocally and all the time be a man. In the nature of things, it wasn’t difficult for Robert Black to fill this bill. A great many words have been written in the effort to tell what soldiers want—if they want anything at all—from their chaplain. They are not hard to satisfy, critical though they are and pitiless, when they detect failure to measure up to their requirements. The greatest of these requirements is certainly simple enough and just enough; it’s only what is required of themselves, which is to be men and comrades, to the last ditch.