THE WAR BABY

“A baby?” cried Hilda in amazement.

“A baby, my dear,” repeated Mrs. Bracher with emphasis. “Come, hurry up! We’re wanted tout de suite.”

The women had been sitting quite peacefully after supper. A jerk at the bell cord, a tiny tinkle, and Mrs. Bracher had answered the door. A big breathless civilian stood there. He said

“Please, the Madame Doctor, quick. The baby is coming.”

These astonishing peasants! Hilda could never get over her wonder at their stolidity, their endless patience, their matter-of-fact way of carrying on life under a cataclysm. They went on with their spading in the fields, while shrapnel was pinging. They trotted up and down a road that was pock-marked with shell-holes. They hung out their washings where machine-gun bullets could aerate them. The fierce, early weeks of shattering bombardment had sent the villagers scurrying for shelter to places farther to the west. And for a time, Pervyse had been occupied only by soldiers and the three nurses. But soon the civilians came trickling back. They were tired of strange quarters, and homesick for their own. There were now more than two hundred peasants in Pervyse men, women and children. The children, regardless of shell fire, scoured the fields for shrapnel bullets and bits of shells. They brought their findings to the nurses, and received pieces of chocolate in return. There was a family of five children, in steps, who wore bright red hoods. They liked to come and be nursed. The women had from six to a dozen peasants a day, tinkling the bell for treatment. Some came out of curiosity. To these was fed castor-oil. One dose cured them. They came with every sort of ailment. A store-keeper, who kept on selling rock candy, had a heel that was “bad” from shrapnel. One mite of a boy had his right hand burned, and the wound continued to suppurate. He dabbled in ditch-water, and always returned to Hilda with the bandage very wet and dirty.

Here was their home Belgium, flowering and happy, or Belgium, black and perishing. Still it is Belgium, the homeland. Why take on the ugly hazards of exile?

If your husband is ill and broken, you stay by him. He is your man. So with the land of your birth, the village where you are one with the soil. You stay and suffer, and meantime you live. Still you plant and plough, though the guns are loud in the night, and Les Bosches just over the meadow. And here was one of these women in the wrecked, charred village of Pervyse carrying on the great, natural process of life as unperturbed as if her home was in a valley of peace.

The three women ran over to a little house two hundred yards down the road. One wall of it was bullet-chipped, one room of it a wreck from a spent obus. But, for the rest, it was a livable little place, and here was gathered a Flemish family. The event was half over, as Mrs. Bracher, closely followed by Scotch and Hilda, rushed in. The mother, fully dressed, was lying on a wooden bed that fitted into an alcove. She was typically Flemish, of high cheek-bones and very red cheeks. The entire family was grouped about the bed a boy of twelve years, a girl of nineteen, and a girl of three. Attending the case, was a little old woman, the grandmother, wearing a knitted knobby bonnet, sitting high on the top of her head and tied under her chin a conical frame for her pert, dark eyes and firm mouth. She was a tiny woman, every detail of her in miniature, clearly defined, except the heavy, noisy wooden shoes. She carried in her personality an air of important indignation. With the confidence of a lifetime of obstetrical experience, she drew from her pocket a brown string, coarse and dirty, and tied up the newcomer’s navel. It was little the nurses were allowed to help. Though a trained and certificated midwife, Mrs. Bracher was edged out of the ministration by the small, determined grandmother, who looked anger and scorn out of her little black eyes upon the three. She resented their coming. Antiseptic gauze and hot-water bottles were as alien as the Germans to her.

So “Pervyse” entered this world. Nothing could hold him back, neither shell nor bayonets. He had slipped through the net of death which men were so busily weaving. There he was, a matter of fact a vital, lusty, shapeless fact. To that little creature was given the future, and he was stronger than the artillery. By all the laws, vibrations of fear ought to have passed into the tiny body. His consciousness, it would seem, must be a nest of horrors. Instead of that, his cry had the insistence of health. His solemnity was as abysmal as that of a child of peace.

When the girls visited “Pervyse” next morning, the grandmother was nursing him with sugar and water from a quart bottle. She had him dressed in dark blue calico. Thereafter twice a day they called upon him, and each time Hilda carried snowy linen, hoping to win the grandmother. But the old lady was firm, and “Pervyse” was to thrive, looking all the redder, inside blue calico. The mother was a good mother, sweet and constant. Very slowly, the nurses won her confidence and the grandmother’s respect.

“Do come away,” urged Hilda. “Let me take you all back to La Panne, where it is safer. Give ‘Pervyse’ his chance. It is senseless to live here in this shed under shell fire. Some day, the guns will get you, and then it will be too late.”

But always they refused, mother, and brother, and big and little sister, and grandmother. The village was their place. The shed was their home.

Hilda brought her beautiful big ambulance to their door. There was room enough inside for them all to go together, with their bundles of household goods. And the mother smiled, saying:

“The shells will spare me. They will not hurt me.”

“You refuse me to-day,” replied Hilda, “but to-morrow I shall come again to take you away. I will take you to a new, safe home.”

Very early the next morning, Hilda heard the sick crumble that meant the crunching of one more dwelling. She hurried to the door, and looked down the road. The place of the new birth had tumbled, and a thick smoke was rising from the wreck. She ran faster than she had ever run for her own safety. She came to the little home in a ruin of plaster and glass and brick-dust. Destruction, long overdue, had fallen out of the sunny blue sky on the group of reckless survivors in that doomed village. The soldiers were searching in the smoking litter for bodies. Big sister and little sister and brother were dead, and the little old grandmother. The mother, with shell wounds at her nursing breasts, was dying. Only “Pervyse” was living and to live. By a miracle of selection, he lay in the wreck of his house and the grave of his people one foot half off, but otherwise a survivor of the shell that had fallen and burst inside his home.

Swiftly Hilda in her car, carried mother and child to La Panne to the great military hospital. The mother died in two hours on the operating table, and “Pervyse” was alone in a world at war.

The story and fame of him spread through the last city left to the Belgians. All the rest of their good land was trampled by the alien and marred by shell-fire and petrol. Here, alone in Flanders, there was still music in the streets, even if it was often a dead march. And here life was still normal and orderly. “Pervyse” found shelter in the military hospital where his mother had come only to die. He was the youngest wounded Belgian in all the wards. They put him in a private room with a famous English Colonel, and they called the two “Big Tom” and “Little Tom.” The blue calico was changed for white things and “Pervyse” had a deep, soft cradle and more visitors than he cared to see.

The days of his danger and flight were evil days in Pervyse, for the guns grew busier and more deadly. There came a last day for the famous little dressing-station of the women. It began with trouble at the trenches. Two boys of nineteen years were brought in to the nurses. One of them was carrying the brains of a dead comrade on his pocket. A shell had burst in their trench, giving them head wounds. They died in the hall. They had served two days at the front. The women placed them on stretchers in the kitchen, and covered their faces, and left them in peace. A brief peace, for a shell found the kitchen, and the blue fumes of it puffed into the room where the women were sitting. The orderly and four soldier friends came running in, holding their eyes. When Hilda entered the kitchen, she saw that the shell had hit just above those quiet bodies, bringing the rafters and glass and brick upon them. A beam, from the rafter, had been driven into the breast of one of the boys transfixing him as if by a lance. Shells were breaking in the road, the garden, the field and the near-by houses, every five seconds. In her own house, bricks were strewn about, and the windows smashed in. A large hole, in a shed back of the house, marked the flight of a shell, and behind it lay a dead man who had taken refuge there.

A Belgian had driven up their car a moment before and it was standing at the door. One soldier started to the car a shell drove him back a second dash and he made it, turned the car, and the women darted in. They sped down the road to the edge of the village, and here the nurses found shelter. Later that day the Colonel handed them a written order to evacuate Pervyse, lent them men to help, and gave them twenty minutes in which to pack and depart. They returned to their smashed house, and piled out their household goods. They left in the ambulance with all the soldiers cheering them. They were a sad little lot. So the loyal four months of service were ended under a few hours of gun-fire, and Hilda and her friends had to follow “Pervyse” to his new home.

As she went down the road, she took one last look at the shattered place. No house in her earthly history had concentrated so many memories. There she had put off the care-free girl, and achieved her womanhood, as if at a stroke. There she and her friends had healed a thousand soldiers. They had welcomed the Queen, princes, generals, brave officers soon to die, famous artists under arms, laughing peasant soldiers, the great and the obscure, such a society gathered under the vast pressure of a world-war as had seldom graced the “At-Homes” of an Iowa girl. There she had won fame, and a dearer thing yet, honor, which needs not to be known in order to shed its lonely comfort. She was leaving it all, forever, in that heap of plaster and crumbling brick.

She had rarely had him out of mind since that experience in Wetteren Convent, when they two had visited the little girl who lay dying of her bayonet wounds. But it was a full five months since she had seen him.

“I had to come back,” said Hinchcliffe; “New York seemed out of it. I know there is work for me here some little thing I can do to help you all.

“What luck?” he added.

“A shell has been following me around,” replied Hilda. “So far, it has aways called too late, or missed me by a few feet of masonry. But it’s on my trail. It took the windows out of my room at a doctor’s house in Furnes. Later on, it went clean through my little room up over a tailor’s shop. In Pervyse we had our Poste de Secours in the Burgomaster’s house. One morning we had stepped out for a little air we were a couple of hundred yards down the road when a big shell broke in the house. And now our last home in Pervyse is blown to pieces. Luck is good to me.”

Hinchcliffe took his place, and a strong place it was, in the strange life of La Panne. A word from him smoothed out tangles. The Etat Major approved of him. He was twice arrested as a spy, and enjoyed the experience hugely. At one time, there was a deficiency of tires of the right make, and he put a rush order clear across the Atlantic and had the consignment over in record time. He cut through the red tape of the transport service, red tape that had been annoying even the established hospitals. He imported comforts for the helpers. There was a special brand of tea which the English nurses were missing. So there was nothing for it, but his London agent must accompany the lot in person to La Panne. There was something restless, consuming, in his activity.

“Your maternity hospital is a great idea,” said Hinchcliffe to Hilda, during one of their talks. “I’ve cabled for five thousand pounds. That will start things.”

The maternity hospital had been suggested to Hilda by the plight of little “Pervyse,” and the hundreds of other babies of the war whom she had seen, and the hapless peasant mothers. Military hospitals are for soldiers, not for expectant mothers or orphaned children, and “Pervyse’s” days of glory were ending. Reluctantly Colonel Depage, head surgeon of the hospital, had told Hilda that “Pervyse” must seek another home. His room was needed for fighting men.

“Let me have him christened first?” asked Hilda, and the great Belgian physician had consented.

It took her a week to make ready the ritual, but the morning came at last.

“To-day we christen ‘Pervyse,’” said Hilda to the banker. “Will you come?”

“It isn’t just my sort of speciality,” replied Hinchcliffe, “but of course I’ll come, if you’ll show me the moves.”

Hilda had chosen for the ceremony a village church on the Dixmude road. They put all the little necessary bundles of baby life into Hilda’s ambulance a packet of little shawls, and intimate clothing, a basket of things to eat, a great christening cake, frosted by Dunkirk’s leading confectioner, a can of chocolate and of cream, candy baskets of sweets. It was Sunday a cloudless, innocent day. They dodged through Furnes, the ruined, and came at length to the village of their quest. They entered the convent, and found a neat, clean room of eight beds. Two babies had arrived. Six mothers were expectant. In charge of the room was a red-cheeked, black-eyed nurse, a Flemish girl, motherly with the babies. Hilda dressed “Pervyse” in a long, white, immaculate dress, and a gossamer shawl, and pinned upon him a gold pin. She set the table in the convent the cake in the center of the table, with one candle, and snowy blossoms from a plum tree.

Then the party started for the church: fifteen-year-old René, the Belgian boy scout who was to serve as godfather, giggling; the apple-cheeked Flemish girl carrying “Pervyse”; Hilda and Hinchcliffe closely following. They walked through the village street past laughing soldiers who called out, “Les Anglais!” They entered the church through the left door. A puff of damp air blew into their faces. In the chancel stood a stack of soldiers’ bicycles. They kneeled and waited for the Cure. In the nave, old peasant women were nodding and dipping, and telling their beads. The nurse handed the baby to Hilda. René giggled. Three small children wandered near and stared. On the right side of the church was heaped a bundle of straw, and three rosy soldiers emerged who had been sleeping there. They winked at the pretty Flemish nurse. The church for them was a resting-place, between trench service.

The old Cure entered with his young assistant. The youth was dudish, with a business suit, and a very high, straight collar that struck his chin. The Cure was in long, black robes, with skirts a yellow man, gray-haired, his mouth a thin, straight slit, almost toothless. His eyebrows turned up, as if the face were being pulled. His heavy ears lay back against his head, large wads of cotton-wool in them. He talked with the nurse, inquiring for the baby’s name. There were a half-dozen names for the mite family names of father and mother, so that there might be a survival of lines once so numerous. Rene’s name, too, was affixed. The Cure wrote the names down on a slip of paper, and inserted it in his prayer-book. The service proceeded in Latin and Flemish.

Then “Pervyse” was carried, behind the bicycles, to a small room, with the font. Holy water was poured into a bowl. The old priest, muttering, put his thumb into the water, and then behind each ear of the baby, and at the nape of the neck. At the touch on the neck “Pervyse” howled. The priest’s hand shook, so that he jabbed the wrong place, and repeated the stroke. Then the thumb was dipped again, and crossed on the forehead, then touched on the nose and eyes and chin. Between the dippings, the aged man read from his book, and the assistant responded. To Hinchcliffe, standing at a little distance, the group made a strange picture “Pervyse” wriggling and sometimes weeping; Hilda “Shsh, Shysh, Shshing”; René nudging the Flemish girl, and giggling; the soldiers peeping from the straw; the children, attracted by the outcries of “Pervyse,” drawing closer; aged worshippers continuing their droning. “Pervyse” was held directly over the bowl and the slightly warmed water descended on him in volume. At this he shouted with anger. His head was dried and his white hood clapped on. He was borne to another room where from a cupboard the Cure took down the sacred pictures, and put them over the child’s neck. René sat on the small stove in the corner of the room, and it caved in with a clatter of iron. But no side-issue could mar the ceremony which was now complete. “Pervyse” had a name and a religion.

Then it was back again to the convent for the cake, inviting the good old Cure to be one of the christening party. “Pervyse,” his hand guided, cut the christening cake. The candle was lighted.

As the christening party sped homeward to La Panne, Hilda looked back. High overhead on the tower of the church, two soldiers and two officers with field glasses were stationed, signalling to their field battery.

Without a mishap, they had returned to the military hospital, and “Pervyse,” thoroughly awakened by the ceremony, had been restored to his white crib. To soften his mood, his bottle of supper had been handed to him a little ahead of time. But, unwilling to lay aside the prominence which had been his, all day, he brandished the bottle as if it were a weapon instead of a soporific.

“A pretty little service,” said Hilda, “but there was something pathetic to it. The little kid looked so lonely in the damp old church. And no one there that really belonged to him. And to-morrow or the next day or some day, they’ll get the range of this place, and then little ‘Pervyse’ will join his mother and his brother and sisters. With us older ones, it doesn’t so much matter. We’ve had our bit of walk and talk and so good-by. But with a child it’s different. All that love and pain for nothing. One more false start.”

“By God, no!” said Hinchcliffe. “‘Pervyse’ shall have his chance, the best chance a kid ever had. I’ve got to get back to America. There’ll be a smash if I don’t. I’m a month late on the job, as it is. But ‘Pervyse’ goes with me. Little Belgium is going to get his chance.”

“You mean ” said Hilda.

“Certainly, I do,” replied the banker. “I mean that we’re going to bring that kid up as good as if war was a dream. We’re going to make him glad he’s alive. He’s going back to America with me. Will you come?”

“Why,” said Hilda, her eyes filling, “what do you mean?”

“I mean that I need you. Show me how to put this thing, that we’ve been doing here, into New York. It’s a different world after the war. You have often said it. America mustn’t be behind. I want to catch up with these Red Cross chauffeurs. I want our crowd in Wall Street to be in on the fun. Come on and help.”

“I don’t know what to say,” began Hilda. “I shall miss you so. The boys in the ward will miss you, the babies will miss you.” She laughed. “I can’t come just now. There is so much work, and worse ahead.”

“Later, you will come?” he pleaded. He turned to the child who was wielding his bottle as a hammer on the foot of the bed, and lifted him shoulder high.

“Remember,” he said, as the bottle was thumped on his head, “‘Pervyse’ and I will be waiting.”

The bottle fell on the floor, and the outraged glass splintered, and “Pervyse’s” supper went trickling down the cracks.

“You see,” said the banker, “we are helpless without you.”