Their mobile unit was held up that day in a little ruined city. Only one other dressing-station was there, and the wounded were passing through so fast and so wounded that many could not go on. So they set up another dressing-station and worked through the night until the stars went out and their orders came to hurry on. They caught two hours’ sleep and by noon of another day they were as close to the front as a hospital unit could go.
A dugout had been portioned out to them, and while orderlies brought in their equipment and the surgeons were coupling up lights and sterilizer, Sheila started to get a hot meal in two sterilizing basins. The nurse was just drawing in her first breath of real war. Before she had time to exhale it a despatch-bearer climbed down into the dugout and handed an order to the chief. It was from headquarters, and brief. The division did not intend to have any woman’s name on its casualty list. Sheila was to be returned at once. The bearer added the information that an ambulance was returning with wounded; she could take it.
The chief had never seen the nurse turn so white. Her eyes spoke the appeal her lips refused to make. He tried to put something into words to make it easier for her, but gave it up in final despair. What was there to say? In silence the girl put on her trench coat, jammed on her hat, and was gone. For the first kilometer her senses were too numbed to allow for much thinking. Mechanically she passed her canteen to one of the wounded, readjusted a blanket over another. It was not until the division turned loose its first barrage that day that she woke up to what was happening to her. She was going back; she was not going to have her chance.
The noise was terrific. It drowned everything but the mutinous hammerings of her own heart. In the flash of an eye she changed from the Sheila O’Leary of civilized production to a savage, primitive woman. She had but one dominating instinct, to stand by the male of her tribe, to succor him, fight with him, die with him. It seemed as futile a thing to try to stay this impulse as to try to put out the burning of a prairie when the wind blows.
The ambulance stopped with a jerk. Something was wrong with the engine. The driver climbed down and threw back the hood, and, unnoticed, the nurse slipped down and passed him. When he had finished his tinkering, Sheila was fifty rods away across the meadow.
“Here, you, you come back!” shouted the driver.
For answer Sheila doubled her speed.
The driver watched her, uncertain what to do. A shell whizzed from beyond the barrage and burst a hundred yards from the nurse. The shock threw her, but she was up in an instant, her course changed toward some deserted trenches. The driver hesitated no longer. He climbed back and started the engine.
“No use tacklin’ them kind,” he remarked to the empty seat beside him. “She’ll get there or she won’t—but she won’t turn back.”
It was nightfall when Sheila came up with what she had chosen to call “her division.” She intended to possess it in spite of the commander. An outpost sentry challenged what he thought a wraith. His tongue fumbled the words, “Oh, Gawd! it’s a woman!”