She smiled. “It wasn’t given me in either your country or mine, but upon the sea.”
Then she walked over to another patient who required a drink of water.
CHAPTER XV
Newspaper Letters
Curiously Mildred Thornton was also spending an unexpected afternoon. She had been looking forward to her walk with Mrs. Curtis. Mildred too had been feeling the strain of the first weeks at the hospital more than she had confessed. She was one of the girls whom one speaks of as a natural nurse—quiet, sympathetic and efficient—and so had immediately been given especially trying cases. And Mildred was not accustomed to roughing it, since her home surroundings were luxurious and beautiful. So though she had made no complaint and showed no lack of courage, as Barbara had, she was tired and now and then, when she had time to think, homesick.
Mrs. Curtis had been kind and whatever prejudice the other girls felt, she sincerely liked her. Moreover, Mildred also liked her son, although this she had not confessed so freely to herself. But she was thinking of both of them as she walked through the fields to the home of Mère Marie.
Perhaps Mrs. Curtis would have received news from Brooks. He was supposed to be not far away making a study of conditions in the British line of trenches not far from the Belgian border. He must know extraordinarily interesting things. Mildred too shared the almost morbid curiosity which everybody of intelligence feels today. What is a modern battlefield really like, what is the daily life of the soldier, and what is this strange new world of the trenches, where men live and work underground as if all humanity had developed the tendencies of the mole?
Mildred did not share Nona Davis’ desire to go and find out these things for herself, but being so near the scene of action as they were could not but stimulate one’s interest. And daily the motor ambulances brought the wounded from the nearby battlefield to their door.
At Mère Marie’s Mildred first saw the boy Anton sitting crouched before the hut. He leered at her foolishly and said something which she did not understand. So somewhat nervously Mildred knocked on the heavy wooden door. She too was afraid of Anton; one could scarcely help being, although all the people in the neighborhood insisted that he was perfectly harmless. As he used to bring vegetables from his mother’s garden and run errands for the staff at the hospital, he was a very well-known character.
However, Mildred was just as glad when the door opened.