‘All available cars wanted immediately at the Gare Maritime. Better get some lunch first.’
That lunch was of the briefest. Keith dumped their luggage in the hall without so much as asking if there were rooms to be had. Helen did not even open the coveted letter from Mark till they were back in the motor, speeding towards the bare unsheltered gare, where impromptu and comfortless hospital trains disgorged their tragic loads. Mercifully the sun of that miraculous autumn still shone unclouded; and, by the time autumn gave place to the wettest winter in decades, better arrangements had been made.
All that afternoon they worked unceasingly, and late into the night. Back and forth, back and forth between station and hospital, jolting inevitably over railway lines, and a strip of merciless cobble pavement that, for men with shattered limbs, hurriedly dressed, involved several minutes of excruciating agony.
‘Keith, couldn’t they possibly take up that cruel bit of pavé?’ Helen pleaded after their seventh journey with three men at death’s door. ‘Even a raw road would be better than those stones.’
‘I’ll move heaven and earth to get it improved,’ he assured her, little guessing that he had pledged himself to a labour of Hercules.
By the time they could take breath and think about finding beds, they were all dead weary, sustained only by the knowledge that they had given their mite of service to the utmost of their power. In Mark’s letter, which Helen had scarcely found time to read, there was a sentence on this head that had haunted her brain throughout those strenuous hours.
‘Oh Mums, if only the good casual folk at home could be made see even the half of what we see in the way of wanton destruction and calculated brutality, wherever the gentle German has left his trail, they’d possibly begin to realise the powers of evil we’re up against in this war, and things in general would march to a different tune. But they can’t see. That’s the trouble. And hearing about such things isn’t the same at all. If we’re ever going to win through hell to human conditions again, it won’t be merely by signing cheques and making speeches, but by the individual personal service of every man and woman in whatever capacity; and I’m proud to feel you three are giving it like Trojans. God bless you all!’
She stood gleaning a few more scraps under an electric light, when Keith came up to say he had secured a room for her and Sheila; and a friendly Irish doctor had offered him a bed in his hospital train.
‘I’m in great luck with my two assistants,’ he added, smiling down at her eager, tired face. ‘Sheila betters my expectation, which is saying a good deal. Her self-possession to-day astonished me. She’d have the nerve for advance ambulance work in the firing line, I do believe. But I’m glad we’ve got her safe here.’