Meantime they were thankful for unremitting work—for the constant movement and interest of life at the Base. Young officers, eager for action, might be bored to extinction by a few weeks in camp or in one of the crowded hotels; but an observer, blessed with humour and a large love of human nature, could not fail to find at every turn food for thought, for laughter and for tears.
War is neither all horror, nor all heroism, or it could not be waged by flesh and blood. Soldiers who can die like gods, or fight as the beasts that perish, are, in the intervals, men of like passions with their kind. And genuine soldiers were scarce among those who now poured into Boulogne, to fill the gaps in that dangerously thin line round Ypres—Territorials and schoolmasters, clergymen and clerks, lords of commerce and lords of the land; dissimilar in almost every essential, yet welded together by one common resolve, one common faith: a crusade indeed, as Mark had said.
And the manifold needs of a host undreamed of by the wildest, wickedest ‘militarists,’ demanded the existence of that other army chiefly congregated at the Base: doctors, nurses, chaplains, ambulance folk, owners of private cars, and those sorrowful birds of passage—relations of dying or dangerously wounded men. On the quays, in streets and hotels they thronged, those incongruous fragments of the world’s greatest drama; and Lady Forsyth never tired of watching them or listening to their snatches of talk. Neither weariness, nor nightmare visions, nor anxiety, even, could blunt the edge of her keen interest in the human panorama.
‘Oh, Sheila, my lamb,’ she exclaimed one evening after a day of very varied emotions, ‘aren’t people—all sorts and kinds of them—passionately interesting? Even when I’m laid on the uttermost shelf I shall still be always peeping over the edge!’
‘And you’ll always find me peeping up at you,’ the girl answered, smiling at the quaint conceit. ‘It’s simply wonderful, being with you—through all this!’
A temporary lull in the stream of wounded was followed, too soon, by a renewed rush of hospital trains filled to overflowing—the harvest of a fresh German onslaught. But by this time there were more cars and more stretcher-bearers. Ambulance trains, splendidly equipped, were being hurried out from England; and the Customs sheds at the station had become a great shelter, roughly partitioned into dressing-stations, for those who had need of immediate care. From this seed of voluntary effort there sprang up, in time, a big stationary hospital; but by then the Forsyth-Macnair car was needed elsewhere.
Meantime, in every effort to minimise the sufferings of the men he served, Keith was actively to the fore. Helen herself was amazed at his energy and versatility—he whom she had hitherto regarded as a man wedded entirely to books and thought. But among all the surprises of a war rich in surprise, good and evil, were none more remarkable than such unlooked-for revelations of human capacity and character.
Day in, day out, the work went on. There were strange discoveries, sad and glad, on that ever-crowded platform; but of the three they looked for—Mark, Maurice and Ralph—never a sign, as yet.
(To be continued.)