"Listen!" he said.
That was the first time Sara Lee had ever heard the quiet shuffling step
of tired men, leaving their trenches under cover of darkness. Henri
threw his military cape over her shoulders and she stood in the dark
doorway, watching.
The empty street was no longer empty. From gutter to gutter flowed a
stream of men, like a sluggish river which narrowed where a fallen house
partly filled the way; not talking, not singing, just moving, bent under
their heavy and mud-covered equipment. Here and there the clack of
wooden sabots on the cobbles told of one poor fellow not outfitted with
leather shoes. The light of a match here and there showed some few
lucky enough to have still remaining cigarettes, and revealed also, in
the immediate vicinity, a white bandage or two. Some few, recognizing
Henri's officer's cap, saluted. Most of them stumbled on, too weary to
so much as glance aside.
Nothing that Sara Lee had dreamed of war was like this. This was dreary
and sodden and hopeless. Those fresh troops at the crossroads that day
had been blithe and smiling. There had been none of the glitter and
panoply of war, but there had been movement, the beating of a drum, the
sharp cries of officers as the lines re-formed.
Here there were no lines. Just such a stream of men as at home might
issue at night from a coal mine, too weary for speech. Only here they
were packed together closely, and they did not speak, and some of them
were wounded.
"There are so many!" she whispered to Henri. "A hundred such efforts as
mine would not be enough."
"I would to God there were more!" Henri replied, through shut teeth.
"Listen, mademoiselle," he said later. "You cannot do all the kind work
of the world. But you can do your part. And you will start by caring for
only such as are wounded or ill. The others can go on. But every night
some twenty or thirty, or even more, will come to your door--men
slightly wounded or too weary to go on without a rest. And for those
there will be a chair by the fire, and something hot, or perhaps a clean
bandage. It sounds small? But in a month, think! You will have given
comfort to perhaps a thousand men. You--alone!"
"I--alone!" she said in a queer choking voice. "And what about you?
It is you who have made it possible."
But Henri was looking down the street to where the row of poplars hid
what lay beyond. Far beyond a star shell had risen above the flat
fields and floated there, a pure and lovely thing, shedding its white
light over the terrain below. It gleamed for some thirty seconds and
went out.