“Yes. Will you pass her? Lots to do.”
He looked at the red cross on her arm and smiled foolishly. “You bet there is! Sure I’ll pass you.”
She came up with the first battalion, bivouacked under a shell-riven ridge.
“A woman!” The first boy whispered it, and the exclamation rippled on to the next and the next like wind in dry leaves. Remembering the exodus of the morning, the nurse knew if she was to stay she must prove her need and prove it quickly. Her voice was as business-like as in the old San days.
“Dressing-station? Company’s surgeon? Wounded? Doesn’t matter which, only get me some work.”
A hand slipped out of the darkness and caught her elbow. “This way, lady,” and she was drawn along the protecting shelter of the ridge. After rods of stumbling she stumbled down irrational stairs into the same dugout she had left that morning. She was almost as surprised as the two surgeons.
“You’re a fool,” muttered Griggs. “Wait till they order me back. I’ll not be crying for purgatory twice.”
The chief smiled. “I reckon you got that S O S call I’ve been sending out all day. We need help like sixty. Bichloride’s under that basin. We’ll be ready for you when you’ve washed up. Night ahead—” His words trailed off into an incoherent chuckling. He was wondering how the girl had managed it. He was wondering more what the command would do when it found out. In the mean time he was glorying in her courage; he would see she got full measure of the work that had claimed her in spite of orders, while he silently thanked a merciful God for providing her.
No one questioned her right to be there that night. Wounded poured in, flooded the dugout to capacity, were cared for, carried away, and more flooded again. It was daybreak before a lull came, and then there were orders to be ready to follow the battalion in an hour. So they ate a snatch, packed, and rolled on in the wake of the Allies’ conquest.
Again it was nightfall before they caught up with their regiment. Even to eyes as inexperienced as theirs it was easy to see it had been factored and factored again, and not the half of it was standing. They found a couple of regimental surgeons floundering through a sea of wounded. The nurse had to bite her lips to keep back the cry of horror over the apparent hopelessness of the task that lay before them. So many—and so few hands to do it all!