The last case in Bonsecours' unit had just been lifted from the table. Swathed in bandages it was laid once more upon a stretcher and carried rearward to a waiting ambulance whose racks would then be filled. Carefully, to spare his charges added pain, the driver engaged the clutch and started, but in so vile a condition was this road that the heavily loaded machine plunged as a mired horse. Yet there were no groans. Teeth might have been grit within that canopy of suffering, but the men were too game to make an outcry.

A nurse having come as far as the ambulance, now gave a stifled sob as she watched it lumber, like a huge beetle, over the uneven terrain. Her arms stiffened and her hands closed into little brown fists—for she knew too well what those bumps and plunges were doing to the lacerated human freight!

Standing alone upon a mound of earth and staring after it, her face touched by the amber glow of a westering sun that hung as an immense orange in the smoke of battle, all of Hillsdale would have gasped at her amazing beauty. For the mere prettiness which they had known, enhanced by happiness and laughter, was now transformed. As the chisel of Michael Angelo first carved but a placid face for the Mary in his masterful Pieta, and later gnawed into it shadows of pain and love until it became a part of God, so had the chisel of suffering humanity brought out the wonderful character which had been a latent part of this Nurse Marian. Her figure, while always the embodiment of grace, though attuned to the easy things of life, now stood as if it were akin to war's great sinew. She seemed indeed to be an ivory column of strength and softness, of support and beauty, of courage and tenderness.

In another minute she turned and went back to the dressing-stations where there was much cleaning up to be done—or as much as could be done—before the next stretcher arrived. Yet it did not come. The room, the table, the instruments had been put in order; the great Bonsecours sat resting on a box, and the other nurses had stepped outside the entrance, furtively watching. It seemed incredible that in all the head-splitting noises so near to them there should not be wounded men for the gathering!

"I don't understand it," he arose and crossed to Marian. "But, surely, some will be here soon!"—for, unlike Barrow's unit stationed a hundred yards away, his orderlies and assistants had been trained in many battles. There could be only one answer if they remained out much longer!—and he would then go himself, to fetch his own cases. He had done it many times before, which was one of the reasons the French army worshipped him.

"I'll run up and look," she cried.

"No, I'm afraid," he said.

"The great Bonsecours afraid?" she laughed—for, no matter how tired her own body might feel, she always managed to laugh when he showed signs of great fatigue.

"Afraid I could not live if anything happened to you, mon chÈre," he murmured.

A startled look flashed into her eyes, slightly different than that caused by the excitement of battle. Many weeks ago her intuition had measured the strength of this man's love for her, and had seen with unerring accuracy his honorable resistance to its pleading, when, during temporary lulls in their work, he might have spoken. That he had said this much now, indicated an overpowering mental and physical exhaustion. Even as she realized this, he realized his weakness, and hastened to add:

"I will go; you must stay inside."

"No, no," she sprang between him and the dug-out entrance. "You are so tired! I know you've not slept for two days!"

"Have you?" he smiled at her.

"Lots!" she lied—and he knew she lied. "I want you to rest—you owe it to them out there! It will take only a second for me to run up and have one peep!—there's no danger in that, and I can tell you if they're coming!"

"It will bring them no sooner," he sighed, sinking back again upon the box, "and there is danger—plenty of it."

Almost immediately he was asleep. She looked at him tenderly for a moment, then ran into the quadrangle, turning and following the steep path which led to the high ground above the dug-outs.

The scene beyond, as she now crouched and peered over the crest, was what she might have expected—yet one can never become quite used to such pictures as that! Below was the first-line trench, deserted since the third division had been sent forward, and its emptiness gave her a feeling of insecurity. She would have preferred a visual line of stalwart fellows between her and the maddened enemy, instead of one that had gone into the smoke. She looked back to see if another division were coming up, but the intervening world seemed destitute of habitation, save along the smoke-fringed horizon where French artillery spoke. Once more she turned to the empty trench, her face perplexed and somewhat frightened.

Just ahead lay the No Man's Land of eight hours ago; the new one for tomorrow had not yet been plotted out, but would doubtless lie a mile or so nearer the Rhine. Her staring eyes then caught and held two men, walking tandem, and she knew they carried a stretcher. They were two hundred yards away, obscured by smoke, and coming slowly. For an instant she glanced over the field hoping to discover others, and, on looking back, was amazed to find that the first were nowhere in sight. The air was already more or less thick with death, and she gasped at the thought of what their disappearance must mean.

Indifferent to the warning of Bonsecours—whom she knew would never hesitate were he in her place—she ran swiftly down to the trench, kneeled on the narrow bridge and frantically called in the hope that some one, slightly wounded or ill, perhaps, had been left behind who now might help her. But the solitude was ghastly. She called again and again, screaming that some of her unit had been shelled with the man they were bringing in. The pity of this seemed infinitely worse than the wounding of combatants; yet the ditch remained utterly devoid of life—the only answer she seemed to catch was that it waited merely to embrace the dead. Without giving a further thought to dangers, she sprang up and ran out across the field.

Going breathlessly, she watched for a glimpse of the brown stretcher. Prone bodies might not have guided her aright, for there were several of these; but the point she sought would have a stretcher, and there had been no other stretchers within sight. Then she came upon it. Hastings lay as he had fallen. One hand still grasped the handle—it was his left hand, the side whereon he wore the Red Cross emblem. Quick tears blinded her, but she brushed them away and kneeled by the wounded soldier. He lived, although merciful unconsciousness had come to him. She looked hastily around to see—at the same time wanting not to see—where the other man had fallen, and shuddered when she realized that he must have been blown to dust. The wounded soldier, then, was the only one here who needed her! She started to roll him on the stretcher, intending to drag it behind her and in this way sled him in; but its poles had been shattered. She tried to lift him, and found that to be utterly impossible.

The confusion was maddening out there upon that deserted No Man's Land. To the dug-out openings, pointing away from it, noises had been partially tempered; certainly the acrid smoke was less down in the quadrangle, and she had therefore not been prepared for quite such a cataclysm. Now a shell burst within fifty feet of her, providentially first burrowing, but sending a fountain of earth into the air that fell upon her like hail. Another burst.

In desperation dragging the wounded soldier to a nearby crater she slid him into it, and was about to follow when checked by a curious sight—for a man crouched there with his face against the side. One could have died in that position, yet this man lived because his body trembled visibly. Encircling his sleeve was the band of the Red Cross, and upon seeing this she leaped down to him, asking fearfully:

"Are you badly wounded?"

He did not look around, and she laid a hand gently on his arm, not daring to touch it firmly lest it be shattered.

"Tell me," she began again, in a louder voice, "are you badly wounded?"

Slowly he turned a face matted with sweat and powdered earth, haggard, as though it had been drawn up from a grave. She uttered a wild scream of recognition.

"Jeb!"

Her eyes opened to him. They suggested fluid-vague sympathies and fears that many a man would have bartered his life for; but this one before her only stared back with a look that was hardly sane, then turned again to the crater wall. He seemed to be stunned; without feeling, indeed, because dust and grit were plastered on one of his eye-balls.

"Jeb," she screamed, horrified at this, "tell me quickly where you're hurt!—oh, Jeb!"

He shook his head, muttering something she could not hear; but his gesture implied a negative. At first she did not understand; she could not reconcile this with the fact that he crouched inactive when wounded men were gasping for relief.

"Not hurt?" she insisted, taking hold of his arm. "But you must be, Jeb! You must be—to be here!"

Petulantly he shook off her hand; slowly she drew away from him, beginning—yet fearing—to understand. "But you must be, Jeb! You must be—to be here!"

"Help me, Jeb! There's a man behind you hit pretty hard!—help me get him in!"

She had again reached out and taken hold of him, but this time he jerked away, crying with his mouth against the earth:

"Let him stay! Only a fool would go out there!"

Her young eyes, already schooled in a realm of ravages that exists beyond the ken of those who do not go to wars, grew suddenly older. They seemed at last to have met a thing they could not look upon! They had witnessed the dying of many men—but here was a dying soul! As she had healed men, she now clutched for an heroic remedy in the hope of saving this more precious thing than life. But first, pitifully pleading, with her lips close to his ear, she asked:

"You must be wounded! For the love of Christ tell me the shell blew you here—that you didn't come willingly! Tell me even that you're dying, Jeb, but not——"

She could not say it, and waited, while his silence answered. Forgetting everything else she sprang to her feet and stepped back, her eyes narrowing at what she had discovered to be under his uniform—or, rather, not under it! In a panic she realized that here was a derelict ship of manliness being irresistibly driven by a hurricane of Fear; that a complete wreck was imminent unless she were the master-pilot. Her cheeks were aflame with indignation, her body bending tensely forward might have been a spring of steel set to release some instrument of torture—and then she let the bolt descend like the wrath of furies.

With the smoke of shells sweeping over them, sometimes enveloping her head and shoulders as though she were looking through a storm of anger, she called on God to witness that he was a cringing coward. She stood above him transformed into a superb though outraged figure of Liberty, lashing him with words that at any other time her tongue would have refused to speak; words, some of which she did not know the meaning but had heard from the lips of suffering soldiers. Unconsciously she was following the maxim of a famous officer who one day said to her that all men are cowards somewhere, but brave everywhere if sufficiently aroused; and now she brutally strove to bruise his soul, hysterically telling herself that if it could be made to bleed it would become purified.

Much of this, owing to her incoherence and the noise of battle—and, perhaps, the chaotic tumult in his brain—was unheard; but some little of it registered, for suddenly he turned upon his knees and stared at her, as though his normal faculties were beginning to quicken. For half a minute he stared. No words, no gestures, could have been as eloquent as the look which burned from his pale, haggard face; it was as liquid fire being poured upon the woman for whom he had once avowed a love, and who now cursed him! The tableau, with its weird setting—her condemnation as a whip of flame curled snake-like above his head—might have been a picture put into life, and called "The Flagellation of a Soul"! Then, clapping his hands to his ears, he bowed his head, shrieking:

"Stop it! You hurt!"

"I intend to hurt," she cried down at him. "If you were in the Army you'd be stood before the wall and shot for this!—maybe they'll do it yet! Thank God, the people at home can't see you, you damnable coward!" Yet with her next breath she was wailing to the torn world and tortured air: "Tell me that I've lied! Oh, Jeb, tell me that I've lied!"

He pressed his face again into the powdered earth, and something about his dogged attitude said that she was going too far. Her woman's instinct sent this warning just in time, abruptly causing her to realize that a self-esteem once crushed into complete abasement can never look upon fellow man with its former level eyes—and she was here to save, not to destroy! The crouching figure on whom she had inflicted a wound without having done the slightest good, was, after all, a big, imaginative child in a vast night, utterly unprepared by rearing and training, psychology or properly directed thought, to cope with this demon-carnival into which he had been projected. And why should not the shell's concussion have stunned him into this sad plight?

Retrospection flickering as a shadow picture on the brain has more than once averted tragedies. In the passing of a second she now saw two long-ago scenes: one, his desperate and victorious fight with a boy who had kicked her puppy; the other, neighbors rushing with blankets to a nearby pond, calling that he had swum out and saved a drowning lad—nearly perishing in the effort! While she stared, still horrified; while shells rent the air, and dust and smoke half blinded her, a spirit of maternalism began to plead for this one-time schoolmate—champion of her little dog, life-saver to a comrade! What had she done but add to the agony of one already agonized beyond his power to escape!

A great pity filled her soul, and her body seemed to become liquefied into a tossing sea of tears. With a sob she bent over him and, as all ages of womanhood instinctively understand, gently drew his head against her breast.

"Oh, Jeb! Can't you pull yourself together? Won't you try to be a man?" she asked fiercely.

He staggered up and backed against the crater, holding his hands out to keep her off when she would have followed. But his cheeks had turned from white to crimson, and his eyes flashed a holy, or an unholy, fire.

"I hope to God I never get back to-night," he cried hoarsely. "I hope to God you'll never have to look at anything as despicable as I've been!"

It was he now who occupied the place of the mighty, and she the one who felt like cowering. Turning savagely he all but tossed the unconscious soldier to his shoulders, struggled up the shell hole and ran toward the dressing-stations. Scarcely knowing that her feet touched ground, she flew behind him; sobbing, laughing, wringing her hands—lifted by the great storm of victory which swept her soul.

But at the deserted trench he stopped, laid his burden on the little bridge and turned back.

"Jeb, take him all the way in," she pleaded, catching at his sleeve—but he shook off her hand, yelling like a madman:

"You can get help from here!—don't touch me!—I ain't fit!"

The next instant he was dashing headlong into the smoke. Frantically she screamed:

"Come back!—Jeb!—your unit!"

But she might have made the men on Mars hear as easily. Once she started to run after him, yet the fruitlessness of such a chase—and, more important still, the unconscious soldier's claim for aid—checked her. Blinded by tears, she dashed up the road and down to the quadrangle, staggered into the dug-out, and cried in a strange voice to Bonsecours:

"There's a man out there I can't bring in!"

He sprang up as if electrified. But her words had not alarmed him so much as her appearance and, in desperation catching her by the shoulders, he demanded:

"What has happened—tell me!"

"N—nothing," she sank upon the box, burying her face in her folded arms. She was sobbing hysterically now, and nurses rarely did this—until they snapped!

"Tell me!—tell me!" he cried, leaning over her, and fighting as he had never fought to keep from holding her close to him. His heart had been too nearly starved, his strength too nearly exhausted, to withstand a scene like this. "If you pity me, tell me what has happened," he implored.

She did not look up, but impulsively reached for one of his hands and pressed it fiercely, almost savagely, against her cheek. This must have been the comfort she needed, this touch of a man who was every inch a man, because the sobs at once grew quiet; and, in full control of her nerves, she arose, saying urgently:

"Quick! He's on the trench bridge!"

As in a dream, the great Bonsecours sprang out.