And Saxham rang off, more relieved in mind than he would have cared to own. Then the horn of a motor sounded below in the Hospital courtyard, and another and another followed. Tyres crackled on gravel. The running feet of men pattered on pavement. The hall-porter whistled up the speaking-tube into the Medical Officer's Room, and Saxham went down, meeting the black-robed Mother Prioress and the Sister Superintendent on their way to the great vestibule.
CHAPTER LXII
WOUNDED FROM THE FRONT
The wide-leaved front doors stood open. Doctors and surgeons, theatre-assistants, students, white-habited Sisters, blue-and-white-uniformed nurses and probationers, were swarming in the great vestibule. Already a double stream of canvas stretchers, laden with still figures swathed in iodined gauze and cotton-wool padding, were being carried up the wide steps, from the big grey-painted Red Cross motor-ambulances, by R.A.M.C., and blue-uniformed bearers of St. Theresa's Association, while omnibuses, private cars, taxis from Charing Cross and Victoria were hauled up behind, waiting to disgorge their loads. And cheer upon cheer went up from the packed sidewalks and roadway; handkerchiefs waved from the windows of the nearest houses, and the passengers on the roofs of the omnibuses passing up and down Wellington Road, Edgware Road, and Praed Street, stood up and craned their necks in the fruitless endeavour to glimpse the reason of those frantic cheers.
For the first convoy of wounded from the Front had reached the Hospital. These unwashed, begrimed, hairy brigands, these limping tramps in tattered khaki, these bandaged cripples leading blind comrades, were our Guards, our Gunners, our Highlanders, Kents, Middlesex men and Munsters, our Rifles and Northamptons, our Welsh and Gloucesters, our Scots Greys and Lancers, our immortals of those red-hot days of August, and their compeers, the terrible fighters of the Marne and the Aisne....
They were back, full of cross-nicked, nickel-coated Mauser bullets, bits of shell and lumps of shrapnel, cheap jokes, music-hall choruses, vermin, and spunk. The reek of lysol and carbolic, the sickly whiff of dysentery and the ghastly stench of gangrene, brought back to Saxham the Hospital at Gueldersdorp, as he passed back and forth between the stretchers, issuing swift orders, briefly wording directions, marshalling his trained forces with the generalship that had distinguished him of old.
"Doctor!"
"What is it, Ironside?" Saxham turned to speak to the Resident Medical Officer. "You look off-colour, man!"
"I feel off, sir. They're so damned full of grit, and cheerful! Not only the cases from the Base Hospitals, but those casualties they've sent us direct from the trenches.... Two days in the train getting to Calais—and Lord! the straw and filthiness in their wounds! And we've been told our next War'd be carried out on an absolutely Aseptic Basis, and here we are back in 1900!"
"Not quite," said Saxham. "Wounds like these were never made by Boer shrapnel. Human bodies shattered beyond imagination by High Explosive, rank among the triumphs of Modern Science. After the Stone Age and the Iron Age, the Golden Age and the Age of Shoddy has come the Age of Militant Chemistry. Martianism, in a word."