She answered his questions, and then put one of her own. 'Have you a Red Cross doctor here, M. le Capitaine?'
'Alas! no. The Red Cross attached to my brigade was sent for yesterday. There has been very fierce fighting, Madame—a series of great combats. But my troops are comparatively fresh—they still have to win their laurels.' He looked round, and lowered his voice. 'Have you any German wounded? I hope not. But though they run no real danger'—he had seen a look of—was it fear?—flash into her face—'our soldiers are terribly incensed, for we have come across awful things done by those brutes during the last few days.' His face contracted with reminiscent pain and horror. 'Such sights do not make one feel tender to even a wounded Boche.'
The Red Cross nurse gave him a long sad look. What beautiful, sincere, blue eyes she had—what a firm, finely drawn mouth! He wondered where her husband was fighting.
'I must tell you, mon capitaine, that there are, or perhaps I should say were, a number of dying Germans in the church. All that could be moved "they" took away. But down here, in the barge, I have a very special case——'
She moistened her lips and went desperately on, scarcely aware that he was listening to her with great respect and attention. 'The dying man on the barge is an Englishman, himself a surgeon of the Red Cross, who was wounded by a shell only yesterday. He was untiringly good to our wounded—to all the wounded. It is my great wish M. le Capitaine, that he should have a quiet death.'
'But certainly,' he said eagerly. 'What would not I do—what would we not all do—for any Englishman? I will put two of my own men to guard the approaches to your barge, Madame. As for the wounded in the church, I will at once go there myself, and see that everything is done for the poor devils.'
They bowed ceremoniously to one another, and 'mon capitaine' allowed himself the pleasure of gazing after the slight, graceful figure of the Red Cross nurse as long as it remained within his arc of vision. That was not long, for Jeanne Rouannès sped away swiftly—fearful of what she would find in the little cabin room. It seemed to her so long since she had left it, and she was nervously afraid lest he might have recovered consciousness, and missed her. 'I am coming,' she called out, breathlessly, in English, and then again as she came close to the door, 'I am here,' she said.
But the Herr Doktor went on staring sightlessly before him. He was busily talking, talking argumentatively, in hoarse, broken whispers to himself, and his fingers picked at the brown blanket.
Sinking down on her knees, she grasped his clammy hands in hers, and laid them to her cheek in a passion of desire to soothe, to comfort, to make easier the struggle she thought lay immediately before him.
Suddenly there floated in the sound of men's voices singing—a vast, magnificent roaring volume of sound—'Allons, enfants de la Patrie—ie—ie—ie ...'