The decisive little woman drove the girl to the dining-hut, where other nurses were being supplied with the necessities of life. They were all oddly silent and preoccupied this morning. Even the most volatile Frenchwoman of them all wore a subdued air.
The routine in the wards was much disturbed. Belinda went to Salle III as soon as her nerves were less aquiver. She had learned something about herself this morning that she had not known before. Technically she would never be a good war nurse! The directrice was right. A very few years of such work would leave Belinda Melnotte a nervous wreck.
The stretcher-bearers had already begun to bring into her ward from the operating room all the surgeons had left of the broken bodies sent back from the postes de secours.
It had begun to rain heavily. The guns rolled on as though they would never cease. Every time the knee of the leading brancardier thrust open the swinging door of the ward, cold rain and wind swept in.
Little Erard had a brisk fire burning in the stove, however; and it was well, for there was a great call among the patients for hot-water bottles. They complained, too, that Belinda had not given them her usual attention. Marius thundered forth maledictions upon poor Erard. The little infirmier had accidentally spilled a little egg upon the blessé's clean nightshirt.
"But remember, Marius, we have much to do to-day," the nurse admonished him. "They will fill our ward with unfortunate opérés."
"Ah, the dirty fellows!" growled Marius. "Why do they not take them elsewhere? We do not want them here."
Sympathy for each other's wounds is not always at a high mark among the blessés; but when Gaston, who lacked a leg and an arm both on the same side, so, as he said, he must always go lopsided, pointed out that nobody was keeping Marius from leaving the ward and going out into the rain if he wished to, the growler was silenced.
Sometimes when the door opened to admit a stretcher the wind blew out the alcohol lamp over which the syringe was boiling. The brancardiers left muddy boot prints down the ward. They dumped the opérés almost carelessly into the beds, and clumped out again.
The beds in the ward were at last filled. Without little Erard, Belinda never would have got through that day. Nor did the wounded who had been with her so long fail, after a time, to appreciate her difficulties, all save Marius.