He glanced towards her where she sat at a writing-table, scribbling a hurried letter to Mark in praise of their mutually beloved Mums. Then he went up and touched her shoulder.
‘Good-night, Sheila,’ he said. ‘Get to bed sharp, both of you. I’ll call for you to-morrow.’
‘We’ll be ready early,’ she answered, looking up at him; and he discovered, to his surprise, that her eyes were swimming in tears.
There was a certain monotony about the days of unremitting work that followed—a monotony tinged with its own peculiar high lights and shadows; with beauty and terror, fortitude and anguish, the incoming and outgoing pulse-beat of life at the Base. Scarcely a day passed without some minor incident, some flash of human revelation that none of them would forget while they lived.
For Helen—with every nerve responsive to the suffering around them—the strain of it all proved no light matter; yet, in retrospect, she counted those terrible days as among the richest experiences of her life.
To her it was distracting that wounded men should suffer additional miseries from the fact that even in two and a half months of war it had been impossible to cope with all the complex needs of the situation. Hospitals were few and quite inadequate. The magnificent ambulance trains of later days were still in the workshops at home; while untiring men on the spot did the best they could with the high, comfortless passenger coaches of France. Even the more luxurious sleeping carriages were too cramped for the ingress and egress of badly wounded men; and when, at last, these were landed, like so many bales of goods, on the unsheltered platform of the gare, shortage of ambulance cars and trained stretcher-bearers added the finishing touch to their nightmare journey. But soon after Keith’s arrival, the zeal and organisation of the British Red Cross began to make themselves felt, in this respect as in others. Every ambulance that could be raised in London was rushed across to Boulogne, till in a few days there were eighty of one kind or another plying between train and hospital and ship.
For all that, there was still need of superhuman exertion to cope, even inadequately, with the terrible stream of wounded—the backwash, as it were, from the Homeric struggle round Ypres. In that region the Belgians were making their last desperate stand, and war-worn British divisions—haggard, sleepless, cruelly depleted—were still miraculously holding their own against army corps on army corps of fresh German troops heartened by an overwhelming superiority in guns and shells. There—during those awful days—whole battalions of the finest troops on earth practically ceased to exist; and thence came the main influx of comfortless, overcrowded trains.
Steadily the tale of wounded swelled, till it reached an average of two thousand a day. And what were eighty cars among so many? Little better than the five loaves and two small fishes in Galilee; and here was no hope of miraculous intervention. The outstanding miracle of that golden October—when England neither knew her peril nor the full cost of her salvation—was the superhuman fortitude of those that were broken on the wheel and the untiring energy of those who served them in the teeth of baffling conditions.
Day after day the open platform was thronged with men on stretchers in all stages of mental and bodily collapse: British, Indian, French, Belgian, German—brothers all, for the moment, in suffering if in nothing else. Some stared wildly and talked nonsense; some were apathetic; some incurably cheerful, though often their wounds had not been dressed for days.
The lack of trained stretcher-bearers was a serious difficulty till St. John Ambulance Association came to the rescue. Porters, willing but unskilful, did what they could. Keith himself, and others like him, helped to carry scores of men. From early morning till near midnight the cars of rescue ran to and fro; but in spite of every effort there were unavoidable delays. Men died there on the stretchers, or in draughty cars, while red-tape regulations kept them waiting outside hospitals and ships. And that cruel strip of pavé remained unsmoothed, though Keith had pressed the point with unauthorised persistence. And Helen cursed—so far as her ladyhood permitted—every time they crossed it with patients in the last extremity.