Over the Seas for Uncle Sam

by Unknown

Sir Arthur came in at this moment. I knew by his smile that he had been listening.

"Well, well, so you are to be a Matron, are you?" he teased. I nodded. I was past speech.

"Perhaps you don't know that you will be gazetted as Major in the British army as well. That will probably be your official rank."

And a major I became on my floating hospital. I felt strangely alone at first. The only American among so many English. For the first time in my life I longed for my compatriots. Then one day as we lay at anchor in the harbor, I saw, some distance away, a battleship flying from her mast the Stars and Stripes. I began to cry, I was so glad to see my own flag again. I asked our wireless operator if he would send her a message.

"Will you ask an American officer aboard the Man-o'-War to come aboard the British Hospital ship and speak with an American woman?" The instrument snapped the message. The battleship caught it, and, a few hours later, I saw an American Naval officer for the first time in over a year.

I had never met him before, but I was so glad to talk with him of our own land that I dreaded the time when he must return to his ship. He went at length, and I followed him with my binoculars. It gave me a warm feeling around my heart to have a Yankee ship so close by.

Once I started to work in earnest, I found that my nurses were eager to coöperate with me in every way. Instead of resenting my authority over them, they were anxious to help me, and the fear I felt of my ability to handle this great task was swallowed up by the mountains of work before me. There was no time to fear or to rejoice. There was no time for self, with four thousand souls aboard who needed caring for each hour of the day and night. For our ship was loaded with the wounded from that desperate fighting in the Dardanelles.

There were a great per cent who came to us with hands and feet cruelly frozen, from the weeks and even months in icy trenches. Then there were shell-shock cases. One which appealed to us all was of a chaplain, adored by his regiment. Through the heaviest fire he had stood by his flock with no thought for his own safety. An exploding shell had brought on that strange state of aphasia. He did what he was told to do docilely and quietly, but he remembered nothing that had gone before.

He was sent back to London, his mind still clouded. I used to think of him often—his quiet, studious face and soldierly bearing and his eyes with their eternal question in them, which none of us could answer for him.