The Red Cross Girls in the British Trenches

by Margaret Vandercook

All the nurses who were off duty at the hospital poured out into the garden to say farewell and God-speed to their companions.

Except for the prejudice which Lady Dorothy Mathers and her friends continued to feel against the four Americans, everybody else had been most kind. The English manner is colder than the American or the French, but once having learned to understand and like you, they are the most loyal people in the world.

Three of the American Red Cross girls were beginning to realize this. But Barbara Meade still felt herself misunderstood and disliked. Under normal conditions Barbara was not the type of girl given to posing as “misunderstood” and being sorry for herself in consequence.

The difficulty was that ever since her arrival the horror of the war and the suffering about her had made her unlike herself. She felt terribly western, terribly “gauche,” which is the French word meaning left-handed and all that it implies. Then Barbara had a fashion of saying exactly what she thought without reflecting on the time or place. This had gotten her into trouble not once but a dozen times. She did not mean to criticize, only she had the unfortunate habit of thinking out loud. But most of all, Barbara lamented her own failure as a nurse and all that it must argue to her companions. For so far they had the right to consider her a shirker and a coward, or at least as one of the tiresome, foolish women who rush off to care for the wounded in a war because of an emotion and without the sense or the training to be anything but hopelessly in the way.

It was for this reason that Barbara had finally decided to accept the new opportunity offered her. If she should make a failure of it, she agreed with Eugenia’s frank statement of her case: she must simply go back home so as not to be a nuisance.

Curious, but one of the reasons why Barbara loathed the thought of her own surrender was the idea that if she turned back, she would have to face Dick Thornton in New York City. This thought had been in her mind all along. For one thing she kept recalling how bravely she had talked to Dick of her own intentions, and of how she had reproached him for his idle existence.

The worst of Barbara’s conviction was that should she return a failure, no one would be kinder or more thoughtful of her feelings than Dick. Of course, she had not known him very long, but it had been long enough for her to appreciate that Dick Thornton was utterly without the ugly spirit of “I told you so.” But perhaps his sympathy and quiet acceptance of her weakness would be harder to endure than blame.

So it was a very pale and silent Barbara who walked out of the old stone convent that morning with her arm linked inside Eugenia’s. She was beginning to appreciate Eugenia more and to realize that her first impression of Miss Barbara Meade’s abilities, or lack of them, was not so ridiculously unfair as she had thought.

Certainly no one could be kinder than Eugenia had been in the few days between Barbara’s acceptance of her new work and the time for actually beginning it.

She kept looking at her now, feeling almost as one would at the sight of a frightened child. Poor Barbara was pretending to be so brave. Though she had not spoken again of her own qualms, it was plain enough to the older girl that Barbara was almost ill with apprehension. Not that Eugenia believed she was afraid of the actual dangers that might befall her from going so much closer to the battle front. She suffered from the nervous dread of breaking down at the sight of the wounded and so again failing to make good.