That day strange figures began to mount the sides of the ship, and to occupy its every turn and angle of space. Some of them fell on their knees and slapped the bare deck with their hands, and laughed and cried out, “Thank God, I’ll see God’s country again!” Some of them were regulars, bound in bandages; some were volunteers, dirty and hollow-eyed, with long beards on boys’ faces. Some came on crutches; others with their arms around the shoulders of their comrades, staring ahead of them with a fixed smile, their lips drawn back and their teeth protruding. At every second step they stumbled, and the face of each was swept by swift ripples of pain.
They lay on cots so close together that the nurses could not walk between them. They lay on the wet decks, in the scuppers and along the transoms and hatches. They were like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a raft, and they asked nothing more than that the ship’s bow be turned toward home. Once satisfied as to that, they relaxed into a state of self-pity and miserable oblivion to their environment, from which hunger nor nausea nor aching bones could shake them.
The hospital steward touched the Lieutenant lightly on the shoulder.
“We are going North, sir,” he said. “The transport’s ordered North to New York, with these volunteers and the sick and the wounded. Do you hear me, sir?”
The Lieutenant opened his eyes. “Has she come?” he asked.
“Gee!” exclaimed the hospital steward. He glanced impatiently at the blue mountains and the yellow coast, from which the transport was rapidly drawing away.
“Well, I can’t see her coming just now,” he said. “But she will,” he added.
“You let me know at once when she comes.”
“Why, cert’nly, of course,” said the steward.
Three trained nurses came over the side just before the transport started North. One was a large, motherly looking woman, with a German accent. She had been a trained nurse, first in Berlin, and later in the London Hospital in Whitechapel, and at Bellevue. The nurse was dressed in white, and wore a little silver medal at her throat; and she was strong enough to lift a volunteer out of his cot and hold him easily in her arms, while one of the convalescents pulled his cot out of the rain. Some of the men called her “nurse”; others, who wore scapulars around their necks, called her “Sister”; and the officers of the medical staff addressed her as Miss Bergen.