"I speak the language—yes, Madame," the girl replied.
"Take these men, then, to Salle III," ordered the directrice.
The men on the stretchers were prisoners. The gray-green uniforms—where the garments had not been stripped from the bodies—were unmistakable. The type of countenance as well was unmistakable.
In silence the German wounded were brought into the ward. They, too, were silent; even their groans were stifled as they lay shattered beside their enemies. If the French soldiers might have reviled them at another time, they did not do so now.
The brancardiers lifted the broken bodies from the stretchers to Belinda's clean beds. Most of their foulness had been removed in the receiving ward. Yet the girl almost shrank from touching them.
In her heart was bitter resentment against these members of a race that had plunged the whole world into war. She could not forget the putrid, awful cases of gas gangrene which had been under her care, the results of a horrid and barbarous method of warfare utterly unknown in a presumably Christian world until the brains of Teutonic scientists had suggested it.
Other awful putrefactions and criminal mutilations had come under her eyes in this hospital, directly due to Prussian methods of warfare. She could not forget them; she could not escape their significance. To her these grim, wounded men brought in as prisoners did not seem at all like the blessés she had been nursing. Pity excused none of their faults.
She dressed their wounds as carefully as she did those of her French patients. She listened to them, if they spoke, as patiently as to the others. Yet for that first day and the next her horror of these alien prisoners almost stifled her natural tenderness when she approached them.
Belinda had, during these weeks at the field hospital, become thoroughly imbued with the hatred of the French for their ancient enemies, and by their attitude toward them. She had listened to little but tales of the barbarisms of the detested "Boches." Her mind was filled with stories of rapine and vandalism on the part of the Prussian-baited German hordes.
Yet she was wise enough to hide these deeper feelings from the orderlies and stretcher-bearers, as well as from little Erard. The latter's fantastically expressed hatred of the enemy had been so frequently shown that Belinda feared an outbreak when he was called upon to help with these German wounded.