Red and Black

by Grace S. Richmond

THE Field Hospital in which Jane was at work was now seeing its busiest days. A steady stream of wounded men poured into it, day and night, frequently augmented after a serious engagement at the Front by such a torrent of extra cases that every resource was heavily overtaxed. Surgeons and nurses worked to the limit and beyond it; they kept on long after they should have been released. In Jane’s whole experience in this place no doctor or nurse ever gave up and was sent to the rear until actually forced to do so, by pure physical inability longer to continue. It was amazing how endurance held out, when the need was great, by sheer force of nerve and will. Yet the strain told, and it showed more and more in the worn faces of those upon whom the responsibility fell heaviest.

At a time when the situation was most trying, and the whole hospital force was exhausting itself with effort to cover the demand, a visitor appeared upon the scene who changed the face of things in an hour. He was a surgeon from a famous Base Hospital, himself distinguished both in America, from which he came, and in France, where he had been long serving far in advance of most of his countrymen. He had chosen to spend a brief leave from his work in visiting various Field Hospitals and Casualty Clearing Stations, and on account of his reputation for remarkable success in his own branch of regional surgery his visits had been welcomed and made the most of by his colleagues in the profession.

Arriving at this particular Field Hospital he found its operating rooms choked with cases, its surgeons working in mad haste to give each man his chance for life, in spite of the rush; its nurses standing by to the point of exhaustion. Their forces had been depleted that very day by the sudden and tragic loss of their Chief, who at the conclusion of an incredible number of hours of unceasing labour at the operating table had dropped quietly at the feet of his assistants and been carried out, not to return. He was a man beyond middle age, a slender gray-haired hero of indomitable will, who had known well enough that he was drawing upon borrowed capital but had withheld none of it on that account. His removal from the head of his forces had had no outer effect upon them except to make them redouble their efforts to fill the gap; but not a man nor woman there who was not feeling the weaker for the loss.

It was at this hour that Doctor Leaver, looking in upon the shambles that the operating room had become, and recognizing the tremendous need, a need greater than he had left behind, took off his coat, put on the smeared gown in which Doctor Burnside had fallen at his post—there was not a clean one to be had in the depleted supply room—and went quietly to work. He waited for no authority from anywhere; he was needed for hurt and dying men, and there was no time to lose. Comparatively fresh because of his brief vacation from his own work, experienced beyond any of the men who had been the Chief’s associates, he assumed the control as naturally as they gave it to him.

“By George! I never saw anything like this!” burst smotheredly from the lips of one of the younger surgeons, as he received certain supplies from Jane’s hands. “Talk about rapid work!—Why, the man’s lightning itself. He’s speeded us all up, though we thought we were making a record before. If anybody’d told me this morning that before night I’d be fetching and carrying for Leaver of Baltimore, I’d have told him no such luck. Why, say—I thought I was tired! I’m fresh as a mule, as long as he stands there.”

Doctor Leaver remained for five days, until a man to take the dead Chief’s place could be found. During that period he stopped work only to snatch a few hours’ rest when he could best be spared—if such intervals ever came. His tall, sinewy figure and lean, aquiline face became the most vitally inspiring sight in the whole place, the eyes of surgeons, nurses, and patients resting with confidence upon this skilful quiet man who did such marvellous things with such assured ease.

“Why,” one nurse declared to Jane, as the two made ready trays of instruments just from the sterilizer, “it seems as if he had only to look at a case that’s almost gone to have it revive. I’ve got so that I shall expect to see the dead sit up, pretty soon, if he tells them to. That red-headed boy over there—I wouldn’t have said he had one chance in a million to recover from shock, two hours ago, when he came in. And now look at him—smiling at everybody who comes near him!”

“Yes, Doctor Leaver is wonderful,” Jane agreed, “But remember who he is—one of the very most famous American surgeons we have over here. And modern surgery does do miracles—in the right hands. I never cease to wonder at it.”

One nurse was like another to the busy chief surgeon, or so it seemed—they couldn’t be sure that he would ever know any of them again if he saw them after this was over. But on the fourth day of his stay, as somebody called sharply—“Miss Ray!”—Jane noted that he looked suddenly over at her with that quick, penetrating glance of his which was keeping everybody on the jump. That same evening, during the first lull—or what might be called that—which had occurred for hours on end, he came to her.

“I have a message for you, Miss Ray,” he said, “if you are the Miss Ray who comes from the same part of the States as a young man named Enos Dyer.”