Chapter 6

"What do you think of using black troops against white, miss?" asked Smith, after they had bowled along for a few minutes.

"I'm not a warlike person," replied Hilda, "so I don't know what's the proper thing. But, just the same, I don't like to see them using black men. They don't know what they're fighting about. Anyway, I'd rather help them, than shoot them."

"It isn't their fault, is it, miss?" said Smith.

"By no means," returned Hilda; "they deserve all the more help because they are ignorant."

"That's right enough, too," agreed Smith and relapsed into his constitutional silence. He had a quiet way with him, which was particularly agreeable when the outer air was tense.

They rode on into Dixmude. The little city had been torn into shreds, as a sail is torn by a hurricane. But the ruined place was still treated from time to time with shell fire, lest any troops should make the charred wreckage a cover for advancing toward the enemy trenches. They rode on to where they caught a flash of soldiers' uniform.

In a blackened butt of an inn, a group of Senegalese were hiding. They were great six-foot fellows, with straight bodies, and shoulders for carrying weights--the face a black mask, expressionless, save for the rolling whites of the eyes, and the sudden startling grin of perfect white teeth, when trouble fell out of the sky. They had been left there to hold the furthest outpost. A dozen of them were hale and cheery. Two of them sat patiently in the straw, nursing each a damaged arm. Out in the gutter, fifty feet away, one sat picking at his left leg. Smith turned the car, half around, then backed it toward the ditch, then forward again, and so around, till at last he had it headed back along the road they had come. Then he brought it to a standstill, leaving the power on, so that the frame of the car shook, as the body of a hunting dog shakes before it is let loose from the leash.

There was a wail in the air overhead, a wail and then a roar, as a shell cut close over the hood of the ambulance and exploded in the low wall of the house opposite. Three more came more quickly than one could count aloud.

"Four; a battery of four," said Hilda.

The enemy artillery had sighted their ambulance, and believing it to contain reinforcements or ammunition, were leveling their destruction at it. The high car with its brown canvas covering was a fair mark in the clear morning light. Hilda motioned the two wounded men in the inn to come to the car. They slowly rose to their feet, and patiently trudged out into the road. Smith gave them a hand, and they climbed upon the footboard of the ambulance, and over into the interior. One of the black men called harshly to the man in the ditch down the road. He turned from his sitting posture, fell over on his face, and then came crawling on his hands and knees.

"Why doesn't he walk?" asked Hilda.

"Foot shot away," replied Smith.

She saw the raw, red flesh of the lower leg, as if the work of his maker had been left incompleted. Again in the air there was the moan of travelling metal, then the heavy thud of its impact, the roar as it released its explosive, and the shower of brick dust, iron and pebbles. Again, the following three, sharp and close, one on the track of the other.

"They've got our range all right," said Smith.

The black man, trailing his left leg, seemed slow in coming, as he scratched along over the ground. This is surely death, Hilda said to herself, and she felt it would be good to die just so. She had not been a very sinful person, but she well knew there had been much in her way of doing things to be sorry for. She had spoken harshly, and acted cruelly. She had brought suffering to other lives with her charm. And, suddenly in this flash of clear seeing, she knew that by this single act of standing there, waiting, she had wiped out the wrong-doing, and found forgiveness. She knew she could face the dark as blithely as if she were going to her bridal. Strange how the images of an old-fashioned and outgrown religion came back upon her in this instant. Strange that she should feel this act was bringing her an atonement and that she could meet death without a tremor. The gods beyond this gloom were going to be good to her, she knew it. They would salute Smith and herself, as comrades unafraid.

She was glad, too, that her last sight of things would be the look at the homely face of Smith, as he stood there at his full height, which was always a little bent, very much untroubled by the passing menace. She did not know that there was anyone with whom she would rather go down than with the ignorant boy, who was holding his life cheap for a crippled black man. Somehow, being with him in this hour, connected her with the past of her own life, for, after her fashion, she had tried to be true to her idea of equality. She had always felt that such as he were worthy of the highest things in life. And there he stood, proving it. That there was nobody beside herself to see him, struck her as just a part of the general injustice. If he had been a great captain, doing this thing, he would go down a memory to many. Being an unknown lad of the lower class, he would be as little recognized in his death as in life. It was strange what racing and comprehensive work her brain compassed in a little moment. It painted by flashes and crowded its canvas with the figures of a life-time. Only those who have not lived such a moment, doubt this.

Then came two more shells, this time just in front of the car and low. And now the negro, creeping along, had reached the car. Smith and Hilda lifted him in, and waved good-bye to the black men flattened against the wall of the inn. Smith put on power, and they raced to the turn of the road.

There at the cross-roads, on horseback, was Hilda's faithful and gallant friend, Commandant Jost, friend of the King's. He was using his field-glasses on the road down which they had sped.

"_C'est chaud_," called Hilda to her old friend, "it was lively."

"Yes," he answered soberly. "I just came up in time to see you. I didn't know it was you. I have been watching your car with my glasses. They nearly hit you. I counted ten reports into the street where you were."

"Yes," returned Hilda, "but all's well that ends well."

"How many men did you rescue?" asked the Commandant.

"Three," answered the girl; "the last fellow came slowly. His foot was bad."

The Commandant dismounted and came round to the back of the car. He threw up the hood.

"You did this for black men?" he said slowly.

"Why not?" asked Hilda in surprise. "If they're good enough to fight for us, they're good enough to save."

"The King shall know of this," he said; "it means a decoration. I will see to it."

Hilda's face lighted up for an instant. Then the glow died down; she became grave.

"If anything comes of this," she said simply, "it goes to Smith. I must insist on that."

"There is just one thing about it," replied the Commandant. "We cannot give our decorations around wholesale. The King wishes to keep them choice by keeping them rare. Now it really will not do to add two more decorations to your little group. Two of your women have already received them. This was a brave piece of work--one of the bravest I ever saw. It deserves a ribbon. It shall have a ribbon, if I can reach the King. But two ribbons, no. It cannot be."

"Ah, you don't need to tell me that," returned Hilda. "I know that. One decoration is quite enough. But that decoration, if granted, must go to Smith."

* * * * *

The highest honor in the gift of the King of the Belgians was being conferred: a Red Cross worker was about to be made Chevalier of the Order of Leopold. Doubtless one would rather be decorated by Albert than by any other person in the world. It was plain already that he was going down into history as one of the fabulous good rulers, with Alfred and Saint Louis, who had been as noble in their secret heart as in their pride of place. It was fitting that the brief ceremony should be held in Albert's wrecked village of Pervyse, with shell pits in the road, and black stumps of ruin for every glance of the eye. For he was no King of prosperity, fat with the pomp of power. He was a man of sorrows, the brother of his crucified people.

But the man who was about to be honored kept getting lost. The distinguished statesmen, officers, and visiting English, formed their group and chatted. But the object of their coming together was seldom in sight. He disappeared indoors to feed the wasted cat that had lived through three bombardments and sought her meat in wrecked homes. He was blotted out by the "Hilda" car, as he tinkered with its intimacies. No man ever looked less like a Chevalier, than Smith, when discovered and conducted to the King. Any of the little naval boy officers standing around with their gold braid on the purple cloth, looked gaudier than Smith. He looked more like a background, with his weather-worn khaki, and narrow, high-hitched shoulders, than like the center-piece in a public performance.

There came a brief and painful moment, when the King's favor was pinned upon him.

"The show is over, isn't it?" he asked.

Hilda smiled.

"I suppose you'll go and bury the medal in an old trunk in the attic," she said.

Smith walked across to the car, and opened the bonnet. The group of distinguished people had lost interest in him. Hilda followed him over.

"You're most as proud of that car as I am," she said; "it's sort of your car, too, isn't it?"

Smith was burrowing into the interior of things, and had already succeeded in smearing his fingers with grease within three minutes of becoming a Chevalier.

"Fact is, ma'am," he answered, "it is my car, in a way. You see, my mother's name is Hilda, same as yours. My mother, she gave half-a-crown for it."

WITH THE AMBULANCE

We were carrying a dead man among the living.

"Take him out and leave him," ordered our officer; "it is bad for the wounded men riding next to him and under him."

We lifted him down from his swinging perch in the car. He was heavy at the shoulders to shift. The dead seem heavier than the quick. We stretched him at full length in the sticky mud of the gutter at the side of the road. He lay there, white face and wide eyes in the night, as if frozen in his pain. Soldiers, stumbling to their supper, brushed against his stiff body and then swerved when they saw the thing which they had touched. A group of doctors and officers moved away. Mud from the sloughing tires of the transports spattered him, but not enough to cover him. No one had time to give him his resting-place. We were too busy with the fresher shambles, and their incompleted products, to pause for a piece of work so finished as that cold corpse.

But no indignity of the roadway can long withhold him from his portion of peace, and the land that awakened his courage will receive him at last. There is more companionship under the ground than above it for one who has been gallant against odds.

VII

THE AMERICAN

"Atrocities, rubbish!" said the man. "A few drunken soldiers, yes. Every war has had them. But that's nothing. They're all a bunch of crazy children, both sides, and pretty soon they'll quiet down. In the meantime," he added with a smile, "we take the profits--some of us, that is."

"Is that all the war means to you?" asked Hilda.

"Yes, and to any sensible person," replied he. "Why do you want to go and get yourself mixed up in it? An American belongs out of it. Go and work in a settlement at home and let the foreign countries stew in their own juice."

"Belgium doesn't seem like a foreign country to me," returned the girl. "You see, I know the people. I know young Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville and Commandant Gilson, with the wound on his face, and the boys that come into the Flandria Hospital with their fingers shot away. They are like members of my family. They did something for me."

"How do you make that out?"

The girl was silent for a moment, then she answered:

"They stood up for what was a matter of honor. They made a fight against odds. They could have sold out easy enough."

"Well, I don't know," said the man, stretching his arms and yawning.

"No, that's just the trouble with men like you. You don't know, and you don't care to know. You're all alike; you stand aloof or amused. A great human wrong has taken place, and you say, 'Well, I don't know!'"

"Just a moment," interrupted the man.

"But I haven't finished," went on the girl; "there's another thing I want to say. When Belgium made her fight, she suffered horrible things. Her women and children were mutilated on system, as part of a cold policy. Cruelty to the unoffending, that is what I mean by atrocities."

"I don't believe you," retorted the man.

"Come and see."

Hilda, who had run across from Ghent to London to stock up on supplies for the Corps, was talking with John Hinchcliffe, American banker, broker, financier. He was an old-time friend of Hilda's family--a young widower, in that successful period of early middle-age when the hard work and the dirty work have availed and the momentum of the career maintains itself. In the prematurely gray hair, the good-looking face, the abrupt speech, he was very much American. He was neat--neat in his way of dressing, and in his compact phrases, as hard and well-rounded as a pebble. The world to him was a place full of slackers, of lazy good-nature, of inefficiency. Into that softness he had come with a high explosive and an aim. He moved through life as a hunter among a covey of tame partridges--a brief flutter and a tumble of soft flesh. He had the cunning lines about the mouth, the glint in the eye, of the successful man. He had the easy generosities, too, of the man who, possessing much, can express power by endowing helpless things which he happens to like. There was an abundant sentiment in him, sentiment about his daughter and his flag, and the economic glory of his times. He was rather proud of that soft spot in his make-up. When men spoke of him as hard, he smiled to himself, for there in his consciousness was that streak of emotional richness. If he were attacked for raiding a trolley system, he felt that his intimates would declare, "You don't know him. Why John is a King."

And, best of all, he had a kind of dim vision of how his little daughter would come forward at the Day of Judgment, if there was anything of the sort, and say, "He was the best father in the world."

Hilda and the banker sat quietly, each busy in thought with what had been said. Then the girl returned to her plea.

"Come now, Mr. Hinchcliffe," she said, "you've challenged every statement I've made, and yet you've never once been on the ground. I am living there, working each day, where things are happening. Now, why don't you come and see for yourself? It would do you a lot of good."

"I'm over here on business," objected the banker.

"Perfect reply of a true American," retorted Hilda, hotly. "Here are three or four nations fighting for your future, saving values for your own sons and grandsons. And you're too busy to inform yourself as to the rights of it. You prefer to sit on the fence and pluck the profits. You would just as lief sell to the Germans as to the Allies, if the money lay that way and no risk."

"Sure. I did, in September," said the banker, with a grin; "shipped 'em in by way of Holland."

"Yes," said Hilda, angrily, "and it was dirty money you made."

"What would you have us do?" asked he. "We're not in business for our health."

"I tell you what I'd have you do," returned Hilda. "I'd have you find out which side was in the right in the biggest struggle of the ages. If necessary, I'd have you take as much time to informing yourself as you'd give to learning about a railroad stock which you were going to buy. Here's the biggest thing that ever was, right in front of you, and you don't even know which side is right. You can't spare three days to find out whether a nation of people is being done to death."

"What next?" asked the banker with a smile. "When I have informed myself, what then? Go and sell all that I have and give to the poor?"

"No, I don't ask you to come up to the level of the Belgians," answered Hilda, "or of the London street boys. But what can be asked even of a New York banker is that he shall sell to the side that is in the right. And when he does it, that he shall not make excessive profits."

"Run business by the Golden Rule?"

"No, not that, but just catch a little of the same spirit that is being shown by millions of the common people over there. Human nature isn't half as selfish and cowardly as men like you make out. You'll burn your fingers if you try to put a tag on these peasants and shop-assistants and clerks, over here. They're not afraid to die. The modern man is all right, but you fellows at the top don't give him half a chance. A whole race of peasants can be burned out and mutilated, and it doesn't cause a flutter in the pulse-beat of one of you American traders."

"You're a damn poor American," said the banker bluntly.

"You're the poor American," replied Hilda. "An uncle of mine, with a few 'greats' in front of him, was one of the three to sign the Declaration of Independence for Connecticut. Another of us was in Lincoln's Cabinet. My people have helped to make our country. We were the ones that welcomed Louis Kossuth, and Garibaldi. We are Americans. It's men like you that have weakened the strain--you and your clever tricks and your unbelief. You believe in nothing but success. 'Money is power,' say you. It is you that don't believe in America, not I."

"What does it all come to?" he broke in harshly. "What is it all about? You talk heatedly but what are you saying? I have given money to the Relief Work. I've done something, I've got results. Where would you have been without money?"

"Money!" said Hilda. "A thousandth part of your makings. And these people are giving their life! Why, once or twice a day, they are putting themselves between wounded men and shell fire. You talk about results. There are more results in pulling one Belgian out of the bloody dust than in your lifetime of shaving the market."

The color came into his face with a rush. He was so used to expressing power, sitting silent and a little grim, and moving weaker men to his will, that it was a new experience to be talked to by a person who quite visibly had vital force.

"I used to be afraid of people like you," she went on. "But you don't look half as big to me now as one of these young chauffeurs who take in the wounded under shrapnel. You've come to regard your directive ability as something sacred. You think you can sit in moral judgment on these people over here--these boys that are flinging away their lives for the future. Come with me to Belgium, and find out what they're really fighting about."

Hinchcliffe was used to swift decisions.

"I'll do it," he said.

* * * * *

Hilda took him straight to Ghent. Then she pushed her inquiries out among her Belgian friends. The day before, there had been a savage fight at Alost.

"You will find what you want in Wetteren Hospital," suggested Monsieur Caron, Secretary of the Ghent Red Cross, to Hilda.

"To-morrow, we will go there," she said.

That first evening, she led Hinchcliffe through Ghent. In her weeks of work there, she had come to love the beautiful old town. It was strangely unlike her home cities--the brisk prairie "parlor city," where she had grown up inch by inch, as it extended itself acre by acre, and the mad modern city where she had struggled for her bread. The tide of slaughter was still to the east: a low rumble, like surf on a far-away beach. Sometimes it came whinnying and licking at the very doorstep, and then ebbed back, but never rolled up on the ancient city. It was only an under-hum to merriment. It sharpened the nerve of response to whatever passing excellence there was in the old streets and vivid gardens. Modern cities are portions of a world in the making. But Ghent was a completed and placid thing, as fair as men could fashion it.

As evening fell, they two leaned on St. Michel's bridge of the River Lys. Just under the loiterers, canals that wound their way from inland cities to the sea were dark and noiseless, as if sleep held them. The blunt-nosed boats of wide girth that trafficked down those calm reaches were as motionless as the waters that floated them. Out of the upper air, bells from high towers dropped their carillon on a population making its peace with the ended day. Cathedral and churches and belfry were massed against the night, cutting it with their pinnacles till they entered the region of the early stars and the climbing moon.

Then, when that trance of peace had given them the light sadness which fulfilled beauty brings, they found it good to hasten down the deserted street to the cafés and thronging friendly people. They knew how to live and take their pleasure, those people of Ghent. No sullen silence and hasty gorging for them. They practised a leisurely dining and an eager talk, a zest in the flying moment. Their streets were blocked to the curb with little round occupied tables. Inner rooms were bright with lights and friendly with voices. From the silver strainer of the "filtered coffee" the hot drops fell through to the glass, one by one, black and potent. Good coffee, and a gay race.

But those lively people knew in their hearts that a doom was on its way, so their evenings had the merit of a vanishing pleasure, a benefit not to be renewed with the seasons. Time for the people of Ghent carried the grace of last days, when everything that is pleasant and care-free is almost over, and every greeting of a comrade is touched with Vale. It is the little things that are to be lost, so to the little things the time remaining is given. It is then one learns that little things are the dearest, the light-hearted supper in the pleasant café with the friend whose talk satisfies, the walk down street past familiar windows, the look of roofs and steeples dim in the evening light.

"It's different, isn't it?" said the banker thoughtfully.

"Yes," agreed Hilda; "it isn't much like Chicago."

"Think of destroying places like this!" went on Hinchcliffe. "Why, they can't rebuild them."

"No," laughed Hilda; "this sort of ancestral thing isn't quite in our line."

"How foolish of them to go to war!" continued the banker. When his mind once gripped an idea, it carried it through to the terminal station. Hilda turned on him vigorously.

"You realize, don't you," she said, "that Belgium didn't bring on this war? You remember that it was some one else that came pouncing down upon her. It seems almost a pity, doesn't it, to smash this beauty and hunt these nice people?"

"It's all wrong," he said; "it's all wrong."

* * * * *