"It'll tell ye all's to it, I bet!" he said eagerly.
Maw seemed scarcely interested. It was Luke who broke the seal and read it aloud.
It was written from the Ambulance Headquarters, in Paris—written by a man of rare insight, of fine and delicate perception. All that Nat's family might have wished to learn he sought to tell them. He had himself investigated Nat's story and he gave it all fully and freely. He spoke in praise of Nat; of his friendly associations with the Ambulance men; of his good nature and cheerful spirits; his popularity and ready willingness to serve. People, one felt, had loved Nat over there.
He wrote of the preliminary duties in Paris, the preparations—of Nat's final going to join one of the three sections working round Verdun. It wasn't easy work that waited for Nat there. It was a stiff contract guiding the little ambulance over the shell-rutted roads, with deftness and precision, to those distant dressing stations where the hurt soldiers waited for him. It was a picture that thrilled Luke and made his pulses tingle—the blackness of the nights; the rumble of moving artillery and troops; the flash of starlights; the distant crackling of rifle fire; the steady thunder of heavy guns.
And the shells! It was mighty close they swept to a fellow, whistling, shrieking, low overhead; falling to tear out great gouges in the earth. It was enough to wreck one's nerve utterly; but the fellows that drove were all nerve. Just part of the day's work to them! And that was Nat too. Nat hadn't known what fear was—he'd eaten it alive. The adventurer in him had gone out to meet it joyously.
Nat was only on his third trip when tragedy had come to him. He and a companion were seeking a dressing station in the cellar of a little ruined house in an obscure French village, when a shell had burst right at their feet, so to speak. That was all. Simple as that. Nat was dead instantly and his companion—oh, Nat was really the lucky one....
Luke had to stop for a little time. One couldn't go on at once before a thing like that.... When he did, it was to leave behind the darkness, the shell-torn houses, the bruised earth, the racked and mutilated humans.... Reading on, it was like emerging from Hades into a great Peace.
"I wish it were possible to convey to you, my dear Mrs. Haynes, some impression of the moving and beautiful ceremony with which your son was laid to rest on the morning of September ninth, in the little village of Aucourt. Imagine a warm, sunny, late-summer day, and a village street sloping up a hillside, filled with soldiers in faded, dusty blue, and American Ambulance drivers in khaki.
"In the open door of one of the houses, the front of which was covered with the tri-color of France, the coffin was placed, wrapped in a great French flag, and covered with flowers and wreaths sent by the various American sections. At the head a small American flag was placed, on which was pinned the Croix de Guerre—a gold star on a red-and-green ribbon—a tribute from the army general to the boy who gave his life for France.
"A priest, with six soldier attendants, led the procession from the courtyard. Six more soldiers bore the coffin, the Americans and representatives of the army branches following, bearing wreaths. After these came the General of the Army Corps, with a group of officers, and a detachment of soldiers with arms reversed. At the foot of the hill a second detachment fell in and joined them....