YOUNG HILDA AT THE WARS

She was an American girl from that very energetic and prosperous state of Iowa, which if not as yet the mother of presidents, is at least the parent of many exuberant and useful persons. Will power is grown out yonder as one of the crops. She had a will of her own and her eye showed a blue cerulean. Her hair was a bright yellow, lighting up a gloomy room. It had three shades in it, and you never knew ahead of time which shade was going to enrich the day, so that an encounter with her always carried a surprise. For when she arranged that abundance in soft nun-like drooping folds along the side of the head, the quieter tones were in command. And when it was piled coil on coil on the crown, it added inches to the prairie stature, and it was mellow like ripe corn in the sun. But the prettiest of all was at the seashore or on the hills, when she unbuckled it from its moorings and let it fall in its plenty to the waist. Then its changing lights came out in a rippling play of color, and the winds had their way with it. It was then youth’s battleflag unfurled, and strong men were ready to follow. It was such a vivid possession that strangers were always suspicious of it, till they knew the girl, or saw it in its unshackled freedom. She had that wayward quality of charm, which visits at random a frail creature like Maude Adams, and a burly personality, such as that of Mr. Roosevelt. It is a pleasant endowment, for it leaves nothing for the possessor to do in life except to bring it along, in order to obtain what he is asking for. When it is harnessed to will power, the pair of them enjoy a career.

So when Hilda arrived in large London in September of the great war, there was nothing for it but that somehow she must go to war. She did not wish to shoot anybody, neither a German grocer nor a Flemish peasant, for she liked people. She had always found them willing to make a place for her in whatever was going her way. But she did want to see what war was like. Her experience had always been of the gentler order. Canoeing and country walks, and a flexible wrist in playing had given her only a meagre training for the stresses of the modern battlefield. Once she had fainted when a favorite aunt had fallen from a trolley car. And she had left the room when a valued friend had attacked a stiff loaf of bread with a crust that turned the edge of the knife into his hand. She had not then made her peace with bloodshed and suffering.

On the Strand, London, there was a group of alert professional women, housed in a theatre building, and known as the Women’s Crisis League. To their office she took her way, determined to enlist for Belgium. Mrs. Bracher was in charge of the office a woman with a stern chin, and an explosive energy, that welcomed initiative in newcomers.

“It’s a poor time to get pupils,” said the fair-haired Hilda, “I don’t want to go back to the Studio Club in New York, as long as there’s more doing over here. I’m out of funds, but I want to work.”

“Are you a trained nurse?” asked Mrs. Bracher, who was that, as well as a motor cyclist and a woman of property, a certificated midwife, and a veterinarian.

“Not even a little bit,” replied Hilda, “but I’m ready to do dirty work. There must be lots to do for an untrained person, who is strong and used to roughing it. I’ll catch hold all right, if you’ll give me the chance.”

“Right, oh,” answered Mrs. Bracher. “Dr. Neil McDonnell is shortly leaving for Belgium with a motor-ambulance Corps,” she said, “but he has hundreds of applications, and his list is probably completed.”

“Thank you,” said Hilda, “that will do nicely.”

“I don’t mind telling you,” continued Mrs. Bracher, “that I shall probably go with him to the front. I hope he will accept you, but there are many ahead of you in applying, and he has already promised more than he can take.”

Hilda took a taxi from St. Mary Le Strand to Harley Street. Dr. Neil McDonnell was a dapper mystical little specialist, who was renowned for his applications of psychotherapy to raging militants and weary society leaders. He was a Scottish Highlander, with a rare gift of intuitive insight. He, too, had the agreeable quality of personal charm. Like all to whom the gods have been good, he looked with a favoring eye on the spectacle of youth.

“You come from a country which will one day produce the choicest race in history,” he began, “you have a blend of nationalities. We have a little corner in Scotland where several strains were merged, and the men were finer and the women fairer than the average. But as for going to Belgium, I must tell you that we have many more desiring to go than we can possibly find room for.”

“That is why I came to you,” responded Hilda. “That means competition, and then you will have to choose the youngest and strongest.”

“I can promise you nothing,” went on the Doctor; “I am afraid it is quite impossible. But if you care to do it, keep in touch with me for the next fortnight. Send me an occasional letter. Call me up, if you will.”

She did. She sent him telegrams, letters by the “Boots” in her lodging-house. She called upon him. She took Mrs. Bracher with her.

And that was how Hilda came to go to Flanders. When the Corps crossed from happy unawakened London to forlorn Belgium, they felt lost. How to take hold, they did not know. There were the cars, and here were the workers, but just what do you do?

Their first weeks were at Ghent, rather wild, disheveled weeks of clutching at work. They had one objective: the battlefield; one purpose: to make a series of rescues under fire. Cramped in a placid land, smothered by peace-loving folk, they had been set quivering by the war. The time had come to throw themselves at the Continent, and do or die where action was thick. Nothing was quainter, even in a land of astounding spectacles, than the sight of the rescuing ambulances rolling out to the wounded of a morning, loaded to the gunwale with charming women and several men. “Where will they put the wounded?” was the query that sprang to every lip that gaped at their passing. There was room for everybody but wounded. Fortunately there were few wounded in those early days when rescuers tingled for the chance to serve and see. So the Ghent experience was a probation rather than a fulfilled success. Then the enemy descended from fallen Antwerp, and the Corps sped away, ahead of the vast gray Prussian machine, through Bruges and Ostend, to Furnes. Here, too, in Furnes, the Corps was still trying to find its place in the immense and intricate scheme of war.

The man that saved them from their fogged incertitude was a Belgian doctor, a military Red Cross worker. The first flash of him was of a small silent man, not significant. But when you had been with him, you felt reserves of force. That small person had a will of his own. He was thirty-one years of age, with a thoughtful but kindly face. His eye had pleasant lights in it, and a twinkle of humor. His voice was low and even-toned. He lifted the wounded in from the trenches, dressed their wounds, and sent them back to the base hospitals. He was regimental dentist as well as Doctor, and accompanied his men from point to point, along the battlefront from the sea to the frontier. Van der Helde was his name. He called on the Corps soon after their arrival in Furnes, one of the last bits of Belgian soil unoccupied by the invaders.

“You are wandering about like lost souls,” he said to them; “let me tell you how to get to work.”

He did so. As the results of his suggestions, the six motor ambulances and four touring cars ran out each morning to the long thin line of troops that lay burrowed in the wet earth, all the way from the Baths of Nieuport-on-the-Sea down through the shelled villages of the Ramskappele-Dixmude frontier to the beautiful ancient city of Ypres. The cars returned with their patient freight of wounded through the afternoon and evening.

What had begun as an adventure deepened to a grim fight against blood-poisoning and long-continuing exposure and hunger. Hilda learned to drop the antiseptic into open wounds, to apply the pad, and roll the cotton. She learned to cut away the heavy army blue cloth to reach the spurting artery. She built the fire that heated the soup. She distributed the clean warm socks. Doubtless someone else could have done the work more skilfully, but the someone else was across the water in a comfortable country house, or watching the Russian dancers at the Coliseum.

The leader of the Corps, Dr. McDonnell, was an absurdly brave little man. His heart may not have been in the Highlands, but his mind certainly was, for he led his staff into shell fire, week-days and Sundays, and all with a fine unconsciousness that anything unusual was singing and breaking around the path of their performance. He carried a pocket edition of the Oxford Book of Verse, and in the lulls of slaughter turned to the Wordsworth sonnets with a fine relish.

“Something is going to happen. I can feel it coming,” said Mrs. Bracher after one of these excursions into the troubled regions.

“Yes,” agreed Hilda, “they are long chances we are taking, but we are fools for luck.”

A famous war correspondent paid them a fleeting visit, before he was ordered twenty miles back to Dunkirk by Kitchener.

“By the law of probabilities,” he observed to Dr. McDonnell, as he was saying good-bye, “you and your staff are going to be wiped out, if you keep on running your motors into excitement.”

The Doctor smiled. It was doubtful if he heard the man.

One day, the Doctor got hold of Smith, a London boy driver, and Hilda, and said:

“I think we would better visit Dixmude, this morning. It sounds like guns in that direction. That means work for us. Get your hat, my dear.”

“But I never wear a hat,” she said with a touch of irritation.

“Ah, I hadn’t noticed,” returned the Doctor, and he hadn’t. Hilda went free and fair those days, with uncovered head. Where the men went, there went she. For the modern woman has put aside fear along with the other impediments. The Doctor and Hilda, and, lastly, Smith, climbed aboard and started at fair speed.

Smith’s motor-ambulance was a swift machine, canopied by a brown hood, the color of a Mediterranean sail, with red crosses on the sides to ward off shells, and a huge red cross on the top to claim immunity from aeroplanes with bombs and plumbed arrows.

“Make haste, make haste,” urged Dr. McDonnell, who felt all time was wasted that was not spent where the air was thick. They had ridden for a half hour.

“There are limits, sir,” replied Smith. “If you will look at that piece of road ahead, sir, you will see that it’s been chewed up with Jack Johnsons. It’s hard on the machine.”

But the Doctor’s attention was already far away, for he had been seized with the beauty of the fresh spring morning. There was a tang in the air, and sense of awakening life in the ground, which not all the bleakness of the wasted farms and the dead bodies of cattle could obscure for him.

“Isn’t that pretty,” he observed, as a shrapnel exploded overhead in the blue with that ping with which it breaks its casing and releases the pattering bullets. It unfolded itself in a little white cloud, which hung motionless for an instant before the winds of the morning shredded it.

To Hilda the sensation of being under fire was always exhilarating. The thought of personal peril never entered her head. The verse of a favorite gypsy song often came into her memory these days:

“I am breath, dew, all resources.
Laughing in your face, I cry
Would ye kill me, save your forces.
Why kill me, who cannot die.”

They swept on to Oudekappele and its stout stone church, where lonely in the tower, the watcher, leaning earthward, told off his observations of the enemy to a soldier in the rafters, who passed them to another on the ladder, who dropped them to another on the stone floor, who hurried them to an officer at the telephone in the west front, who spoke them to a battery one mile away.

They took the poplar-lined drive-way that leads to the crossroads. They turned east, and made for Caeskerke. And now Smith let out his engine, for it is not wise to delay along a road that is in clear sight and range of active guns. At Caeskerke station, they halted for reports on the situation in Dixmude.

There, they saw their good friend, Dr. van der Helde, in the little group behind the wooden building of the station.

“I have just come from Dixmude,” he said; “it is under a fairly heavy fire. The Hospital of St. Jean is up by the trenches. I have thirty poor old people there, who were left in the town when the bombardment started. They have been under shell fire for four days, and their nerves are gone. They are paralyzed with fright, and cannot walk. I brought them to the hospital from the cellars where they were hiding. I have come back here to try to get cars to take them to Furnes. Will you help me get them?”

“That’s what we’re here for,” said Dr. McDonnell.

“Thank you,” said the Belgian quietly. “Shall we not leave the lady?” he suggested, turning to Hilda.

“Try it,” she replied with a smile.

Dr. van der Helde jumped aboard.

“And you mean to tell me you couldn’t get hold of an army car to help you out, all this time?” asked Dr. McDonnell, in amazement.

“Orders were strict,” replied the Belgian; “the military considered it too dangerous to risk an ambulance.”

They had entered the town of Dixmude. Hilda had never seen so thorough a piece of ruin. Walls of houses had crumbled out upon the street into heaps of brick and red dust. Stumps of building still stood, blackened down their surface, as if lightning had visited them. Wire that had once been telegraph and telephone crawled over the piles of wreckage, like a thin blue snake. The car grazed a large pig, that had lost its pen and trough and was scampering wildly at each fresh detonation from the never-ceasing guns.

“It’s a bit warm,” said Smith, as a piece of twisted metal, the size of a man’s fist, dropped by the front wheel.

“That is nothing,” returned Dr. van der Helde.

They had to slow up three times for heaps of ruin that had spread across the road. They reached the Hospital. It still stood unbroken. It had been a convent, till Dr. van der Helde commandeered it to the reception of his cases. He led them to the hall. There down the long corridor were seated the aged poor of Dixmude. Not one of the patient creatures was younger than seventy. Some looked to be over eighty. White-haired men and women, bent over, shaking from head to foot, muttering. Most of them looked down at the floor. It seemed as if they would continue there rooted, like some ancient lichen growth in a forest. A few of them looked up at the visitors, with eyes in which there was little light. No glimmer of recognition altered the expression of dim horror.

“Come,” said Dr. van der Helde, firmly but kindly, “come, old man. We are going to take you to a quiet place.”

The one whom he touched and addressed shook his head and settled to the same apathy which held the group.

“Oh, yes,” said Dr. van der Helde, “you’ll be all right.”

He and Smith and Dr. McDonnell caught hold of the inert body and lifted it to the car. Two old women and one more aged man they carried from that hall-way of despair to the motor which had been left throbbing under power.

“Will you come back?” asked Dr. van der Helde.

“As soon as we have found a place for them,” replied Dr. McDonnell.

The car pulled out of the hospital yard and ran uninjured through the town. The firing was intermittent, now. Two miles back at the cross-roads, four army ambulances were drawn up waiting for orders.

“Come on in. The water’s fine,” cried Hilda to the drivers.

“Comment?” asked one of them.

“Why don’t you go into Dixmude?” she explained. “There are twenty-six old people in St. Jean there. We’ve got four of them here.”

The drivers received an order of release from their commanding officer, and streamed into the doomed town and on to the yard of the hospital. In two hours they had emptied it of its misery.

At Oudekappele Hilda found a room in the little inn, and made the old people comfortable. At noon, Dr. van der Helde joined her there, and they had luncheon together out of the ample stores under the seat of the ambulance. Up to this day, Doctor van der Helde had always been reserved. But the brisk affair had unlocked something in his hushed preserves.

“It is a sight for tired eyes,” said the gallant doctor, “to see such hair in these parts. You bring me a pleasure.”

“I am glad you like it,” returned Hilda.

“Oh, it is better than that,” retorted the Doctor, “I love it. It brings good luck, you know. Beautiful hair brings good luck.”

“I never heard that,” said Hilda.

That night, for the first time since the hidden guns had marked Dixmude for their own, the Doctor slept in security ten kilometers back of the trenches. That night a shell struck the empty hospital of St. Jean and wrecked it.

“Well, have you worked out a plan to cure this idleness,” said Mrs. Bracher, thundering into the room, like a charge of cavalry. “I’ve done nothing but cut buttons off army coats, all day.”

“Such a day,” said Hilda, “yes, we’ve got a plan. We met Dr. van der Helde again to-day. He is a brave man, and he is very pleasant, too. He has been working in Dixmude, but no one is there any more, and he wants to start a new post. He wants to go to Pervyse, and he wishes you and Scotch and me to go with him and run a dressing-station for the soldiers.”

“Pervyse!” cried Mrs. Bracher. “Why, my dear girl, Pervyse is nothing but a rubbish heap. They’ve shot it to pieces. There’s no one at Pervyse.”

“The soldiers are there,” replied Hilda; “they come in from the trenches with a finger off or a flesh wound. They are full of colds from all the wet weather we had last month. They haven’t half enough to eat. They need warm soup and coffee after a night out on duty. Oh, there’s lots to do. Will you do it?”

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Bracher. “How about you, Scotch?”

Scotch was a charming maiden of the same land as Dr. McDonnell. She was the silent member of a noisy group, but there was none of the active work that she missed.

“Wake up, Scotch,” said Hilda, “and tell us. Will you go to Pervyse and stay? Mrs. Bracher and I are going.”

“Me, too,” said Scotch.

The next day, Dr. van der Helde called for them, and they motored the seven miles to Pervyse. What Dixmude was on a large scale, that was Pervyse in small. A once lovely village had been made into a black waste. On the main streets, not one house had been left unwrecked. They found a roomy cellar, under a house that had two walls standing. Here they installed themselves with sleeping bags, a soup kitchen, and a kit of first-aid-to-the-injured apparatus.

Then began for Hilda the most spirited days of her life. They had callers from all the world at seasons when there was quiet in the district. Maxine Elliot, Prince Alexander of Teck, Generals, the Queen of the Belgians, labor leaders so ran the visiting list. The sorrow that was Belgium had become famous, and this cellar of loyal women in Pervyse was one of the few spots left on Belgium soil where work was being done for the little hunted field army.

The days were filled with care of the hurt, and food for the hungry, and clothing for the dilapidated. And the nights she knew she would not forget those nights, when the three of them took turns in nursing the wounded men resting on stretchers. The straw would crackle as the sleepers turned. The faint yellow light from the lantern threw shadows on the unconscious faces. And she was glad of the smile of the men in pain, as they received a little comfort. She had never known there was such goodness in human nature. Who was she ever to be impatient again, when these men in extremity could remember to thank her. Here in this worst of the evils, this horror of war, men were manifesting a humanity, a consideration, at a higher level than she felt she had ever shown it in happy surroundings in a peaceful land. Hilda won the sense, which was to be of abiding good to her, that at last she had justified her existence. She, too, was now helping to continue that great tradition of human kindness which had made this world a more decent place to live in. No one could any longer say she was only a poor artist in an age of big things. Had not the poor artist, in her own way, served the general welfare, quite as effectively, as if she had projected a new breakfast food, or made a successful marriage. Her fingers, which had not gathered much gold, had at least been found fit to lessen some human misery. In that strength she grew confident.

As the fair spring days came back and green began to put out from the fields, the soldiers returned to their duty.

Now the killing became brisk again. The cellar ran full with its tally of scotched and crippled men. Dr. van der Helde was in command of the work. He was here and there and everywhere in the trenches at daybreak, and gathering the harvest of wounded in the fields after nightfall. Sometimes he would be away for three days on end. He would run up and down the lines for seven miles, watching the work. The Belgian nation was a race of individualists, each man merrily minding his own business in his own way. The Belgian army was a volunteer informal group of separate individuals. The Doctor was an individualist. So the days went by at a tense swift stride, stranger than anything in the story-books.

One morning the Doctor entered the cellar, with a troubled look on his face.

“I am forced to ask you to do something,” began he, “and yet I hardly have the heart to tell you.”

“What can the man be after,” queried Hilda, “will you be wanting to borrow my hair brush to curry the cavalry with?”

“Worse than that,” responded he; “I must ask you to cut off your beautiful hair.”

“My hair,” gasped Hilda, darting her hand to her head, and giving the locks an unconscious pat.

“Your hair,” replied the Doctor. “It breaks my heart to make you do it, but there’s so much disease floating around in the air these days, that it is too great a risk for you to live with sick men day and night and carry all that to gather germs.”

“I see,” said Hilda in a subdued tone.

“One thing I will ask, that you give me a lock of it,” he added quietly. She thought he was jesting with his request.

That afternoon she went to her cellar, and took the faithful shears which had severed so many bandages, and put them pitilessly at work on her crown of beauty. The hair fell to the ground in rich strands, darker by a little, and softer far, than the straw on which it rested. Then she gathered it up into one of the aged illustrated papers that had drifted out to the post from kind friends in Furnes. She wrapped it tightly inside the double page picture of laughing soldiers, celebrating Christmas in the trenches. And she carried it outside behind the black stump of a house which they called their home, and threw it on the cans that had once contained bully-beef. She was a little heart-sick at her loss, but she had no vanity. As she was stepping inside, the Doctor came down the road.

He stopped at sight of her.

“Oh, I am sorry,” he said.

“I don’t care,” she answered, and braved it off by a little flaunt of her head, though there was a film over her eyes.

“And did you keep a lock for me?” he asked.

“You are joking,” she replied.

“I was never more serious,” he returned. She shook her head, and went down into the cellar. The Doctor walked around to the rear of the house.

A few minutes later, he entered the cellar.

“Good-bye,” he said, holding out his hand, “I’m going up the line to Nieuport. I’ll be back in the morning.” He turned to climb the steps, and then paused a moment.

“Beautiful hair brings good luck,” he said.

“Then my luck’s gone,” returned Hilda.

“But mine hasn’t,” he answered.

“Let us go up the road this morning,” suggested Mrs. Bracher, next day, “and see how the new men are getting on.”

There was a line of trenches to the north, where reinforcements had just come in, all their old friends having been ordered back to Furnes for a rest.

“How loud the shells are, this morning,” said Hilda. There were whole days when she did not notice them, so accustomed the senses grow to a repetition.

“Yes, they’re giving us special treatment just now,” replied Mrs. Bracher; “it’s that six-inch gun over behind the farm-house, trying out these new men. They’re gradually getting ready to come across. It will only be a few days now.”

They walked up the road a hundred yards, and came on a knot of soldiers stooping low behind the roadside bank.

“What are those men looking at?” exclaimed Mrs. Bracher sharply.

“Some poor fellow. Probably work for us,” returned Hilda.

Mrs. Bracher went nearer, peered at the outstretched form on the grass bank, then turned her head away suddenly.

“No work for us,” she said. “Don’t go near, child. It’s too horrible. His face is gone. A shell must have taken it away. Oh, I’m sick of this war. I am sick of these sights.”

One of the little group of men about the body had drawn near to her.

“What do you want?” she asked crossly, as a woman will who is interrupted when she is close to tears.

“Will I identify him?” she repeated after him. “I tell you I never saw the man.”

A little gasp of amazement came from the soldiers about the body.

“See what we have found,” called one of the men “in his pocket.”

It was a lock of the very lightest and gayest of hair.

“Ah, my doctor,” Hilda cried.

She spread the lock across the breast of the dead man. It was so vivid in the morning sun as to seem almost a living thing.

“And he said it would bring him luck,” she murmured.