The Red Cross Barge

PART V 1

The Herr Stabsarzt was enjoying a steaming cup of hot coffee under the porch of the church which had been his headquarters for five stirring days.

Everything was packed and ready for departure. And the German Red Cross surgeons and their staff were now only waiting for the return of the Herr Doktor Max Keller, and for the parish priest of Valoise.

All final directions had been given to, and intelligently noted down by, Mademoiselle RouannÈs. Not that there was much to say or to hear. Patience and pity were all that seemed likely to be needed, for only the dying—those past hope of recovery either as fighters or as prisoners—were being left behind.

Suddenly a shell burst close to the porch under which the Herr Stabsarzt was eating his hasty breakfast. He uttered a quick, sharp exclamation of anger. It would indeed be rough luck if any of his wounded, the men now stretched out in motor ambulances, and in other less comfortable conveyances, were killed while waiting for the start!

'Any harm done?' he shouted, rising to his feet. But half a dozen reassuring voices answered him.

The foremost portion of the melancholy convoy, that is, the motor ambulances, crammed with the wounded men whose condition was considered too serious for the makeshift wagons or springless carts pressed into the Red Cross service, was already under way. Only one large grey motor, that reserved for the Herr Stabsarzt and his own personal assistants, stood waiting in the open space in front of the church. They would be the last Germans to leave Valoise.

As he sat there, under the grey stone porch—for he was a wise man, and as he had a great deal of enforced standing to do he never stood when he could sit—the Herr Stabsarzt felt more at ease, more 'zufrieden' than he had felt for a long time. A successful medical man—be he physician or surgeon—generally has a kindly, tolerant, understanding outlook on human nature. And this was so with the Herr Stabsarzt Octavius Mott of Ems. But as the minutes went by, and the screaming of the shells grew more insistent, and as they began bursting nearer to the quarter of Valoise they had hitherto spared, he blamed himself for having granted Max Keller's request.

'The poor devils out there, to say nothing of ourselves, will soon be in some danger if this goes on,' he observed to his chief orderly; 'it's time we were——' and then, before he could finish his sentence, there came an awful explosion, followed by the dull thuds of falling masonry, while from close by rose cries and shouts of fear, surprise, and pain.

An Englishman or a Frenchman would have instinctively rushed to see what damage had been done, and especially would he have done so had he been an English or French surgeon. But the Herr Stabsarzt did not move. He simply shrugged his shoulders. His professional labours in Valoise were at an end. If any civilian inhabitant had been wounded by that shell he, or more probably she, must wait for the French Red Cross.

There was a confused stir of sound—exclamations in French and in German. Someone had evidently been seriously hurt—someone was going to be taken into the church.

But what was this which was being borne along so carefully, and by four of his own orderlies, on one of the stretchers which fitted into his own motor ambulance? The Herr Stabsarzt stood up again, and looked anxiously towards the little procession coming slowly towards him. Presently, with surprise and consternation, he saw that the huddled up figure, of which the head, face, and breast were thickly covered with dust and blood, wore the same uniform as he did himself!

'It's surely the Herr Doktor Max Keller?' exclaimed the man by his side. 'Ach, poor fellow! What a sight!'

'Donnerwetter!' The Herr Stabsarzt was not given to swearing, still this piece of black bad luck was too much for his feelings, the more so that he knew his own sympathetic, sentimental heart was responsible.

But after he had bent over the mangled, moaning form of his unfortunate colleague, he softened. This, after all, was the fortune of war! If he had drunk his coffee rather more quickly, it might have happened to himself—it might happen yet.

But what was to be done with the Herr Doktor? Plainly the poor man was in no condition to be moved at all, still less to take a long journey. The Herr Stabsarzt made a brief, but still a very thorough, examination, out there in the wind and sunlight, and that examination made up his mind for him. The only thing to do was to leave Max Keller behind, to take his chance of meeting with a humane and skilful French surgeon. It looked as if at the best there was but very, very little that could be done for him.

Turning away with a troubled face, the Herr Stabsarzt pushed his way back into the church; and, as he did so, a feeling of acute nausea, of intense depression, came over him. How awful, how inhuman, above all how useless, all this was!

Then he told himself that he had been too long in the fresh air; that was why he suddenly found that subtle, sweetish, devilish, gangrene stench so foul, so trying.

He called out sharply from where he stood—'Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle RouannÈs!'

Leaving the bedside of a dying German over whom she had been bending, the young Red Cross nurse hastened down the nave towards him. Her face was a little flushed, her eyes wet, from the piteous ordeal of trying to ease the last moments of a dying man with whose language she was unacquainted, whose last earnest messages she could never hope to transmit to those he loved. It was an ordeal she had gone through often during the last few days, but to which, as yet, she could not make herself grow callously accustomed; and now she was herself too shaken, too eager to get back to the man she had just left, to notice the disturbed expression of the German surgeon's face. Indeed, the meaning of the words he uttered, as he came up close to her, took some moments to penetrate her brain.

'There has been an accident, Mademoiselle. A shell burst close to the Herr Doktor Max Keller. He has been gravely injured, wounded by large fragments of shell in the face and head, while his right arm has been crushed by a piece of masonry or iron girder. He is not in a state to be moved. We must leave him behind in your care. For his sake, I hope a French Red Cross surgeon will soon be here.' He spoke quickly, pronouncing the name of his colleague in the German way, and to Jeanne RouannÈs' ears the name, so uttered, suggested nothing.

'I will do my best to alleviate his pain and to make him comfortable,' she spoke mechanically, and her eyes wandered uncertainly. Where was this newly wounded man?

'I know right well that you will!' The Herr Stabsarzt looked at the French Red Cross nurse curiously. Was it possible that Max Keller's absorption in herself, his plainly-to-be-perceived state of 'Verliebtheit' was ignored by her? Why the poor fellow had been injured, practically killed, in her service! And where, by the way, was the old CurÉ?

'I ask myself, Mademoiselle, if there is any place other than here where the Herr Doktor could be taken—a place clean, quiet and, yes, airy?'

'The Herr Doktor?' She flushed a little. Then it was one of the German surgeons who had been injured? She had thought the man in question to be one of the orderlies.

'He had a great liking for the barge. More than once he expressed to me the opinion that it was the ideal place for wounded men. Could not room be found there for him?'

And then, at last, Jeanne RouannÈs understood. 'Is it—is it he who has been hurt?' she asked. And now there was no lack of concern or distress in her voice.

'Yes, it is the Herr Doktor Max Keller—he who was in Valoise before we arrived here,' he answered gravely. 'And the thought of my good colleague dying in this disturbed and noisy place is painful to me.'

'He shall immediately be taken to the barge. I will come and see to everything. There is a small cabin where he will be quite comfortable, and very, very quiet.'

'And I have your promise to tend him till a French surgeon can take charge of him?'

'But certainly,' she answered. He noticed that she spoke a little breathlessly. 'I promise not to leave him till then.'

Again the Herr Stabsarzt looked at her curiously. Did her troubled face express only the natural sympathy of a sensitive, soft-hearted woman—or something more?

'I will myself accompany you to the barge. We will walk behind the stretcher. It is not very far. Do you wish to tell the women here where you will be?'

'No, Monsieur le MÉdecin,' and this time a wave of colour flooded her face. 'If I do that, they will constantly be sending for me. Everything is in order. There is nothing I could do, that they cannot do.'

She spoke with the decision, the simple directness, which the Herr Stabsarzt admired. What would he not give, in times of peace of course he meant, to have such a capable young woman as this French girl had proved herself to be, in charge of the nurses in his beloved clinik!

2

Jeanne RouannÈs tended the Herr Doktor all that long, still, cloudless day, as together they had tended so many wounded men during those days and nights which had seemed, to her at least, to contain an eternity of painful effort and strain, of dull despair, of agonising sights.

But here, in this clean, water-lapped little cabin-room, there reigned a delicious quietude, only broken by the drowsy murmur of the river which flowed swiftly just outside, past the wooden walls of the barge. From far off, making the stillness the more intense, came the deep booming of great guns, but with the falling of night that also ceased.

She had been prodigal with the morphia the German surgeon had left with her, and still more with that strange, suggestively-named drug, heroine. For she was dully, but none the less firmly, determined that this man should not suffer as some of the men she had tended during the last few days had suffered. He, at least, had earned immunity from that hellish pain by all the pain he had spared others.

He lay so rigidly unmoving that had he not sometimes breathed out a long, tired sigh, and now and again, not often, moved his bandaged head an inch to the right or an inch to the left, she might have doubted if he still lived.

At last an immense, limitless lassitude seemed to fall on Jeanne RouannÈs. Soul, as well as body, cried out and hungered for rest. Slipping down on to the floor, to the left side of the bed, she propped her head against the hard back of a wooden chair and dozed.

She woke—was it moments or hours later?—to hear a little, stuffless sound—that of the Herr Doktor's hand moving feebly across the sheet.

Turning slightly round, and lifting up her right arm, she clasped the poor, limp, nerveless hand in hers....

How many hands, hard, dirty, tortured hands, she had in pity clasped during the last few weeks!—the honest, valiant hands of her young, wounded, fellow-countrymen, in those peaceful, early days of war that now seemed to her so unutterably long ago. Lately, the hands she had held in hers, often in a useless, pitiful attempt to make them understand words of kindness or of hope, had been the huge hands of wounded Germans, those big men-children who had seemed to her so much less stoical in the braving of pain than the more highly-strung French soldiers.

The hand she now held was small and delicate, the hand of a surgeon and a student. How kindly that poor hand, now lying limply clasped in hers, had tended her father! At this thought, this recollection, she pressed it more closely, and as she did so, Max Keller, unknowing where he was, though aware of her nearness, came back to semi-consciousness.

Before his sightless eyes there suddenly gleamed the lights of the Schloss at Weimar, reflected in the waters of the Ulm. Then with extraordinary vividness he saw the Schloss gates—those gates which he had passed such myriads of times in his thirty-four years of life.... A moment later, he was gazing, with the same sense of vivid reality, at the bronze fountain, let into an old wall, of which the subject—found by Goethe in a church in Spain—is that of two beautiful youths, brothers who died young. One youth, who holds a torch reversed, has his arm round the other's neck. Beneath their feet the clear water has gushed forth since the day when Goethe's eyes first rested on the finished work, and now, lying there in the little cabin-room of a French Red Cross barge, Weimar's dying son seemed to hear the delicious bubbling of the spring.

There, too, he saw the door through which so often walked the one woman whom Goethe had supremely loved.

Thousands of times had the happy Goethe walked through that low door on his way to the beloved....

At last, vaguely, obscurely, there came to the Herr Doktor the knowledge of where he was, and who was with him there. But the knowledge brought confusion, and distress of mind. His associations with this little cabin-room were all of the mother-spoilt, given-to-base-pleasures princeling, his Highness Prince Egon von Witgenstein. The thought that the Prince might be in Valoise, lying in wait for the young French Red Cross nurse, disturbed him, made him restless. If only he could remember! But it was as if great stretches of his mind and memory were darkened, hopelessly.

'Honoured miss?' he muttered feebly.

And she answered, oh so gently, in a voice he had never heard her use to him, though often these last few days he had heard it whispering kind, consoling, hopeful things to the suffering and the dying: 'Yes, my friend?'

'Where is Prince Egon—my patient who was here?'

'He left for Paris the day my father became so much worse—don't you remember?'

He remembered nothing, but the nurse reassured and comforted him, gave him a sense of spacious leisure in which to think of himself. 'What has to me happened?' he asked. 'Why am I here?'

'You were wounded by a shell, and I think by the wall of a falling house. We—I and your head surgeon—thought you would be more comfortable here than in the church.'

'And have you the whole time here been?' he asked wonderingly.

'Yes, and I have promised to stay with you till a surgeon comes.'

'You are hÜlfreicher than any surgeon,' he muttered, in so low a tone that she had to lift herself and bend over him to hear the words she did not understand.

The pale white glimmer of the dawn filtered through the white curtain stretched across the little window, and she saw that there was a change, a pinched grey look, in his face. Tears started to her eyes. Then he was not better, as she had ardently hoped. This return to consciousness, to connected thought, was not the good sign she had ignorantly supposed it to be?

Suddenly he groaned, a spent, weary groan. 'Pardon, honoured miss, it is fatigue which the pain hard makes.'

She gave him morphia. 'Try and sleep, my poor friend, and I will do likewise. The morning will soon be here.'

3

There came a series of loud, excited rappings on the door. It burst open, and a little girl—a child to whom in the past, which now seemed Æons away, she had been kind—stood breathless, smiling, 'Mamselle! Mamselle! Our soldiers are here! Come and see them. I ran away from mother to tell you! They said you were here.'

Jeanne RouannÈs put a finger to her lips. She gave a swift look at the unconscious form stretched stiffly out on the narrow bed. If only she could get a surgeon now, at once—

Putting on her cap, she followed the child up the wooden steps leading to the deck of the barge, and even as she did so, she heard the steady, rhythmic sound of marching, broken across by confused, shrill cries of joy and welcome.

Her heart began to beat; she hastened across the sunlit deck of the barge, and ran swiftly down the narrow stone jetty, with the excited little girl clinging to her hand.

'Les voilÀ! Les voilÀ!'

And through a mist of tears Jeanne RouannÈs gazed on a sight she will never forget.

They came swinging along, the familiar, active, red-trousered figures looking so slight, so short, so old-fashioned after the huge, splendidly-equipped Germans. But though war-worn, shabby as their predecessors had never been shabby even at their worst, these countrymen of hers wore their hot, short blue jackets, their wide poppy-coloured trousers with an air—that most inspiring air of all airs—the air of victory.

How ecstatically happy the sight would have made Jeanne RouannÈs a month ago! Now, they simply seemed to her oppressed heart and brain a pageant which brought vague shadowy fears, and a need on her part for thought and action, for which she felt unfit, inadequate.

At last there rode up a regiment of Dragoons. Above their silver helmets—still silver, for these were the early days of war, and the French had not yet learnt the wise and cunning tricks of their enemies—black plumes nodded. Suddenly they were halted, and their commander turned his horse, and rode up under the trees to the spot where the Red Cross nurse was standing. He lifted his helmet off his head, and showed a young, brave, happy face.

'Madame?' he said courteously. 'Can you tell me when the Germans left Valoise? Have they had time to go far? Did they leave in order or in disorder? Is it true that the upper part of the town is in ruins?'

She answered his questions, and then put one of her own. 'Have you a Red Cross doctor here, M. le Capitaine?'

'Alas! no. The Red Cross attached to my brigade was sent for yesterday. There has been very fierce fighting, Madame—a series of great combats. But my troops are comparatively fresh—they still have to win their laurels.' He looked round, and lowered his voice. 'Have you any German wounded? I hope not. But though they run no real danger'—he had seen a look of—was it fear?—flash into her face—'our soldiers are terribly incensed, for we have come across awful things done by those brutes during the last few days.' His face contracted with reminiscent pain and horror. 'Such sights do not make one feel tender to even a wounded Boche.'

The Red Cross nurse gave him a long sad look. What beautiful, sincere, blue eyes she had—what a firm, finely drawn mouth! He wondered where her husband was fighting.

'I must tell you, mon capitaine, that there are, or perhaps I should say were, a number of dying Germans in the church. All that could be moved "they" took away. But down here, in the barge, I have a very special case——'

She moistened her lips and went desperately on, scarcely aware that he was listening to her with great respect and attention. 'The dying man on the barge is an Englishman, himself a surgeon of the Red Cross, who was wounded by a shell only yesterday. He was untiringly good to our wounded—to all the wounded. It is my great wish M. le Capitaine, that he should have a quiet death.'

'But certainly,' he said eagerly. 'What would not I do—what would we not all do—for any Englishman? I will put two of my own men to guard the approaches to your barge, Madame. As for the wounded in the church, I will at once go there myself, and see that everything is done for the poor devils.'

They bowed ceremoniously to one another, and 'mon capitaine' allowed himself the pleasure of gazing after the slight, graceful figure of the Red Cross nurse as long as it remained within his arc of vision. That was not long, for Jeanne RouannÈs sped away swiftly—fearful of what she would find in the little cabin room. It seemed to her so long since she had left it, and she was nervously afraid lest he might have recovered consciousness, and missed her. 'I am coming,' she called out, breathlessly, in English, and then again as she came close to the door, 'I am here,' she said.

But the Herr Doktor went on staring sightlessly before him. He was busily talking, talking argumentatively, in hoarse, broken whispers to himself, and his fingers picked at the brown blanket.

Sinking down on her knees, she grasped his clammy hands in hers, and laid them to her cheek in a passion of desire to soothe, to comfort, to make easier the struggle she thought lay immediately before him.

Suddenly there floated in the sound of men's voices singing—a vast, magnificent roaring volume of sound—'Allons, enfants de la Patrie—ie—ie—ie ...'

There came a gleam across the dying man's face. 'Das ist schÖn' ('That is beautiful'), he whispered.

'... le jour de gloire est arrivÉ!'

The Herr Doktor murmured 'Das genÜgt mir!' ('That is enough!') and his head fell back, sinking deep into the soft pillow.

Jeanne RouannÈs went on holding his dead hand for a few moments. Then she got up from her knees, and made the sign of the Cross on his damp forehead. As she did so, there burst on her ears the closing lines of the great battle hymn of freedom—

and the terrible, inspiring refrain—

Aux armes, citoyens! formez vos bataillons
Marchons;—qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons!

PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. LTD., COLCHESTER
LONDON AND ETON

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