Our friends halted, waiting for an opening in the close-moving stream. Presently it slowed down and stopped, and Joe McCarthy led the way across. But he paused curiously, as did the others, at the open back of an ambulance, and peered in.
The car contained four passengers. Each lay very still upon his stretcher—two upon the floor, and the other two packed neatly on shelves overhead. All were rolled up in brown Army blankets. From the end of one of these protruded a heavily splinted and bandaged foot. Another man had his arm strapped across his chest. The third lay on his face, his back torn by shrapnel. The fourth lay on his back. His head was swathed in bandages, and only one eye was visible. It was closed. One hand was bandaged; the other clasped to his bosom a German sniper’s helmet.
As they gazed, another figure edged in beside them—a London flower-girl, in the usual dilapidated shawl and deplorable hat, with her fragrant stock-in-trade clasped in the hollow of her left arm. She plucked a couple of pink carnations from a bundle, and flung them to the man with the bandaged head.
“For you, ole sport,” she announced, “with my love. So long!”
The wounded man opened his visible eye and smiled his thanks; and the girl was passing on to the next ambulance, there to squander more of her sole means of livelihood, when a hand of iron fell upon her shoulder. On the defensive in a moment, she whirled round.
“Nar, then! You stop pawin’ me! I never done no—”
But Joe McCarthy, misanthrope, merely deprived her of the bundle of pink carnations, placing in her grimy palm in exchange all the money he happened to have with him. It was roughly three days’ pay—no mean sum in the most highly paid Army in the world. Then leaning into the ambulance, which had begun to move again, he deposited the flowers beside the wounded soldier, and said gruffly:
“Say, Tommy!”
The solitary eye opened again, and a voice replied:
“Tommy yourself! I’m from Elizabeth, New Jersey. We’re all Doughboys in here.”