第49章

In the Hospital.

As the tall ship whose lofty prore Shall never stem the billows more Deserted by her gallant band, Amid the breakers lies astrand--Soon his couch lay Rhoderick Dhu, And oft his fevered limbs he threw In toss abrupt, as when her sides Lie rocking in the advancing tides, That shake her frame with ceaseless beat, Yet can not heave her from her seat;--O, how unlike her course on sea!

Or his free step on hill and lea!--Lady of the Lake.

An Army Hospital is the vestibule of the Cemetery--the ante-room where the recruiting-agents of Death--Wounds and Disease--assemble their conscripts to prepare them for the ranks from which there is neither desertion nor discharge.Therein enter those who are to lay aside "this muddy vesture of decay," for the changeless garb of the Beyond.Thither troop the Wasted and Stricken to rest a little, and prepare for the last great journey, the first milestone of which is placed over their heads.

Humanity and Science have done much for the Army Hospital, but still its swinging doors wave two to the tomb where they return one to health and activity.

It was a broiling hot day when Rachel Bond descended from the ambulance which had brought her from the station to camp.

She shielded her eyes with a plam-leaf fan, and surveyed the surroundings of the post of duty to which she had been assigned.

She found herself in a little city of rough plank barracks, arranged in geometrically correct streets and angles about a great plain of a parade ground, from which the heat radiated as from a glowing stove.A flag drooped as if wilted from the top of a tall pole standing on the side of the parade-ground opposite her.Languidly pacing in front of the Colonel's tent was an Orderly, who had been selected in the morning for his spruce neatness, but who now looked like some enormous blue vegetable, rapidly withering under the sun's blistering rays.

Beyond were the barracks, baking and sweltering, cracking their rough, unpainted sides into yawning fissures, and filling the smothering air with resinous odors distilled from the fat knots in the refuse planking of which they were built.Beyond these was the line of camp-guards--bright gun-barrels and bayonets glistening painfully, and those who bore them walking with as weary slowness as was consistent with any motion whatever, along their beats.

On straw in the oven-like barracks, and under the few trees in the camp-ground, lay the flushed and panting soldiers, waiting wearily for that relief which the descending sun would bring.

The hospital to which Rachel had been brought differed from the rest of the sheds in the camp by being whitewashed within and without, which made it radiate a still more unendurable heat than its duller-lustered companions.A powerful odor of chloride of lime and carbolic acid shocked her sensitive nostrils with their tales of all the repulsiveness those disinfectants were intended to destroy or hide.

Several dejected, hollow-eyed convalescents, whose uniforms hung about their wasted bodies as they would about wooden crosses, sat on benches in the scanty shade by one side of the building, and fanned themselves weakly with fans clumsily fashioned from old newspapers.They looked up as the trim, lady-like figure stepped lightly down from the ambulance, and the long-absent luster returned briefly to their sad eyes.

"That looks like home, Jim," said one of the fever-wasted.

"That it does.Lord! she looks as fresh and sweet as the Johnny-jump-ups down by our old spring-house.I expect she's come down here to find somebody that belongs to her that's sick.Don't I wish it was me!""I wouldn't mind being a brother, or a cousin, or a sweetheart to her myself.That'd be better luck than to be given a sutler-shop.

Just see her move! She's got a purtier gait than our thoroughbred colt.""IT does one's eyes good to look at her.It makes me feel better than a cart-load of the stuff that old Pillbags forces down our throats.""You're a-talking.She's a lady--every inch of her--genuine, simon-pure, fast colors, all-wool, a yard wide, as fine as silk, and bright a a May morning.""And as wholesome as Spring sunshine."

All unconscious that her appearance was to the invalids who looked upon her like a sweet, health-giving breeze bursting through a tainted atmosphere, Rachel passed wearily along the burning walks toward the Surgeon's office, with a growing heart-sickness at the unwelcome appearance of the task she had elected for herself.

The journey had been full of irritating discomforts.Heat, dust, and soiled linen are only annoyances to a man; they are real miseries to a woman.The marvel is not that Joan of Arc dared the perils of battle, but that she endured the continued wretchedness of camp uncleanliness, to the triumphant end.

With her throat parched, garments "sticky," hair, eyes, ears and nostrils filled with irritating dust, and a feeling that collar and cuffs were, as ladies phrase it, "a sight to behold," Rachel's heoric enthusiasm ebbed to the bottom.Ushered into the Surgeon's office she was presented to a red-faced, harsh-eyed man, past the middle age, who neither rose nor apologized to her for being discovered in the undress of a hot day.He montioned her to a seat with the wave of the fan he was vigorously using, and taking her letter of introduction, adjusted eye-glasses upon a ripe-colored nose, and read it with a scowl that rippled his face with furrows.

"So you're the first of the women nurses that's to be assigned to me," he said ungraciously, after finishing the letter, and scanning her severely for a moment over the top of his glasses."I suppose I have to have 'em."The manner hurt Rachel even more than the words.Before she could frame a reply he continued: