The Red Cross Barge

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

'Donnerwetter!' The Herr Stabsarzt was not given to swearing, still this piece of black bad luck was too much for his feelings, the more so that he knew his own sympathetic, sentimental heart was responsible.

But after he had bent over the mangled, moaning form of his unfortunate colleague, he softened. This, after all, was the fortune of war! If he had drunk his coffee rather more quickly, it might have happened to himself—it might happen yet.

But what was to be done with the Herr Doktor? Plainly the poor man was in no condition to be moved at all, still less to take a long journey. The Herr Stabsarzt made a brief, but still a very thorough, examination, out there in the wind and sunlight, and that examination made up his mind for him. The only thing to do was to leave Max Keller behind, to take his chance of meeting with a humane and skilful French surgeon. It looked as if at the best there was but very, very little that could be done for him.

Turning away with a troubled face, the Herr Stabsarzt pushed his way back into the church; and, as he did so, a feeling of acute nausea, of intense depression, came over him. How awful, how inhuman, above all how useless, all this was!

Then he told himself that he had been too long in the fresh air; that was why he suddenly found that subtle, sweetish, devilish, gangrene stench so foul, so trying.

He called out sharply from where he stood—'Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle Rouannès!'

Leaving the bedside of a dying German over whom she had been bending, the young Red Cross nurse hastened down the nave towards him. Her face was a little flushed, her eyes wet, from the piteous ordeal of trying to ease the last moments of a dying man with whose language she was unacquainted, whose last earnest messages she could never hope to transmit to those he loved. It was an ordeal she had gone through often during the last few days, but to which, as yet, she could not make herself grow callously accustomed; and now she was herself too shaken, too eager to get back to the man she had just left, to notice the disturbed expression of the German surgeon's face. Indeed, the meaning of the words he uttered, as he came up close to her, took some moments to penetrate her brain.

'There has been an accident, Mademoiselle. A shell burst close to the Herr Doktor Max Keller. He has been gravely injured, wounded by large fragments of shell in the face and head, while his right arm has been crushed by a piece of masonry or iron girder. He is not in a state to be moved. We must leave him behind in your care. For his sake, I hope a French Red Cross surgeon will soon be here.' He spoke quickly, pronouncing the name of his colleague in the German way, and to Jeanne Rouannès' ears the name, so uttered, suggested nothing.

'I will do my best to alleviate his pain and to make him comfortable,' she spoke mechanically, and her eyes wandered uncertainly. Where was this newly wounded man?

'I know right well that you will!' The Herr Stabsarzt looked at the French Red Cross nurse curiously. Was it possible that Max Keller's absorption in herself, his plainly-to-be-perceived state of 'Verliebtheit' was ignored by her? Why the poor fellow had been injured, practically killed, in her service! And where, by the way, was the old Curé?