On a wild night in January Sara Lee inaugurated a new branch of service.
There had been a delay in sending up to the Front the men who had been
on rest, and an incessant bombardment held the troops prisoners in their
trenches.
A field kitchen had been destroyed. The men were hungry, disheartened,
wet through. They needed her, she felt. Even the little she could do
would help. All day she had made soup, and at evening Marie led from
its dilapidated stable the little horse that Henri had once brought up,
trundling its cart behind it. The boiler of the cart was scoured, a
fire lighted in the fire box. Marie, a country girl, harnessed the
shaggy little animal, but with tears of terror.
"You will be killed, mademoiselle," she protested, weeping.
"But I have gone before. Don't you remember the man whose wife was
English, and how I wrote a letter for him before he died?"
"What will become of the house if you are killed?"
"Dear Marie," said Sara Lee, "that is all arranged for. You will send
to Poperinghe for your aunt, and she will come until Mrs. Cameron or
some one else can come from England. And you will stay on. Will you
promise that?"
Marie promised in a loud wail.
"Of course I shall come back," Sara Lee said, stirring her soup
preparatory to pouring it out. "I shall be very careful."
"You will not come back, mademoiselle. You do not care to live, and to
such--"
"Those are the ones who live on," said Sara Lee gravely, and poured out
her soup.
She went quite alone. There was a great deal of noise, but no shells
fell near her. She led the little horse by its head, and its presence
gave her comfort. It had a sense that she had not, too, for it kept her
on the road.
In those still early days the Belgian trenches were quite accessible
from the rear. There were no long tunneled ways to traverse to reach
them. One went along through the darkness until the sound of men's
voices, the glare of charcoal in a bucket bored with holes, the flicker
of a match, told of the buried army almost underfoot or huddled in its
flimsy shelters behind the railway embankment.
Beyond the lines a sentry stopped her, hailing her sharply.
"Qui vive?"
"It is I," she called through the rain. "I have brought some chocolate
and some soup."
He lowered his bayonet.