Billy and Henri had been napping, and never were naps more rudely disturbed.
Shells from the great guns used by the bombarding forces had a way of starting on their course with a minute-long shriek, which seemed to come from the shell itself. When the boys’ eyes had been cleared from sleep they could not only plainly see the projectiles in the beginning of their flight, but also distinctly observe the bellowing air rushing back to fill the vacancy left by the discharge and bounding and rebounding in a disturbed sea of gas.
“What a sight!” cried Billy when the first period of nervous strain had passed.
“Something fierce.” Henri’s comment was boy-like.
The boys were pacing in one of the antique streets with fragments of wood and chips of stone falling about them when they heard a shout, followed down the avenue by the shouter. It was the sergeant rattling like a milk wagon with his military fixings.
“Hustle, you young bearcats; get to cover!”
With that the sergeant yanked each boy by the shoulder into a hospital building nearby.
“Here’s help for you,” said the sergeant to one of the Red Cross nurses. “Keep them busy, and,” he added with especial emphasis, “inside.”
That gentle nurse, a young English girl, the boys learned afterward, was struck by a shell and carried dying on a litter from a battlefield where she had been attending the wounded. Her name was Winnie Bell, and she rests in the cemetery at Le Mans, with the bodies of French and German soldiers around her, in whose service she gave up her noble young life.
The boys moved about with the nurse among the wounded, constantly growing in number.