Months later I saw him again. The government was in need of a matron to take charge of a four-hundred-and-fifty-bed ship bound for South Africa. Fierce battles were raging in Mesopotamia. I was selected for the task. I had eight nurses and a hospital corps of fifty.
As I came aboard her, I saw a familiar figure standing by the gang-plank. I caught my breath. It was the chaplain himself. There he stood, smiling quietly, with hands outstretched.
"I am going with you, Matron," he told me, "to care for the boys."
He was well once more and back again in the field.
Malaria was rampant in Africa. Our ship exceeded capacity by over a hundred cases—men with raging fevers. Working at top speed, we could not bathe them all, and cold baths alone could save them.
The convalescent officers helped us. We worked like machines. Some of the nurses caught the tropical fever, too, but they stuck by their post. They did not dare give in. There were too many sick and dying men calling for them. I have known those girls to stand on their feet when their own temperatures ranged between 103 and 104 degrees. They laughed at the idea of giving in. They couldn't. That was all.
You have heard of the brutality of the Turk. Let me tell you he is gentle compared to the ferocity of the Germans. We lay at anchor near Salonika. The Turks were on one side of the Gulf, the British on the other. More than once I have seen the Turks hoist a white flag to us, and, when we have at length replied to it with our flag of truce, they have sent an envoy aboard. Always, he desired to parley with the Matron instead of with the Commander, and I would be summoned to receive his message.
"Mem Sahib," he would say, "we are about to open fire on the British. You will move your ship about fifty yards. You will then be out of danger." He would bow and return to his regiment, giving us ample time to move before the great guns roared once more.
But the Germans! To bomb a field hospital or shell an ambulance, or sink a Red Cross ship is a triumph for them!
It was three o'clock one morning. We lay in the Mediterranean. An accident case needed instant care. I ran to prepare the "theater," as we call the operating room. The patient was treated and had been lifted to a stretcher when the Huns' torpedo struck us.