The Red Cross Barge

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Occasionally, not often, the French Red Cross nurse would obtain permission to go out into the town to attend on some of them; and perhaps because the thought of any personal danger was so far from them both, during those strange and terrible days, the Herr Doktor Max Keller and Jeanne Rouannès, when engaged on such outside works of mercy, met with none of the mishaps which befell many of those about them.

Such trifling, even childish, incidents and happenings remained imprinted on her heart! Thus, she was shaken with rage and disgust when shown that the curiously shaped steel arrow which had fatally injured a little child, had fastened to it, not only a miniature German flag, but an absurd message, written in bad French, pinned to the flag.

As to the sights which filled her eyes when she was away from the shadowed church, the one which remained the most vividly present to her, in after days, was the effect produced by a fragment of shell which happened to unseal the top of a hydrant. Just out of reach of a fiercely burning building, the water rose like a colossal fountain, throwing exquisite sprays of prismatic colour into the sunny air.

All through those four September days, while friend and enemy destroyed the Haute Ville of Valoise, the sun shone hotly in a clear sky, the air was filled with a soft, luminous haze which rose from the river, and the fierce fighting in the woods behind the town went on in glades and coverts filled with the magic beauty of early autumn scents and tints.

2

Jeanne Rouannès suddenly awoke from what had been a seven hours' deep, death-like sleep. Awoke? Ah no! As she sat up in a darkness broken by tiny, wraithlike shafts of sunlight, she half smiled, half frowned at the strangeness of the nightmare in the mazes of which she found herself involved.

Instead of being in her blue-and-white room at home, surrounded by all her girlish treasures, and lying in the old-fashioned mahogany bed, opposite which hung a charming portrait, painted some thirty years ago, of her gentle, dead mother, she seemed to be—of all the most absurdly improbable places—in the sacristy of the parish church, and sitting up, fully dressed, on a heap of dirty grey coats!

There came over her a sudden misgiving—a mysterious sinking of the heart. Perhaps this was the beginning of illness—of a very serious, terrible illness? She was conscious of agonising, shooting pain in her head, and over her eyes, also of dull, aching sensations in her limbs, especially in her arms.... But if only she could shake herself free of this evil nightmare, she would not mind the pain....

Then there seemed to steal into her delicate nostrils a most horrible odour—And it was that now dreadfully familiar smell, that sweetish, sickly, penetrating smell, which brought back full consciousness to Jeanne Rouannès.

This was no dream—no nightmare. She was in very truth lying, or rather now sitting up, in the sacristy of the old church! It was there that the Herr Doktor had arranged her rude couch the night before; he, too, who had folded one of her blood-stained Red Cross overalls to make a pillow for her head, and, finally, with the thoughtful kindness on which she had grown unconsciously to rely, darkened the two narrow windows with various holy vestments which he had unceremoniously pulled out of M. le Curé's cupboard. She even remembered, now, the form of English words in which, with a queer break in his tired, worn voice, he had ordered her to lie down and sleep.