Ruth Fielding In the Red Cross; Doing Her Best For Uncle Sam

Her work in the hospital and supply room engaged so much of her time that for the first few weeks Ruth scarcely found opportunity to exercise properly. Madame, la Directrice, fairly had to drive her out of the hospital into the open air.

The fields and lanes about the town were lovely. Here the Hun had not seized and destroyed everything of beauty. He had been driven back too quickly in the early weeks of the war to have wreaked vengeance upon all that was French.

Clair was the center of a large agricultural community. The farmers dwelt together in the town and tilled the fields for several miles around. This habit had come down from feudal times, for then the farmers had to abide together for protection. And even now the inhabitants of Clair had the habit of likewise dwelling with their draft animals and cattle!

The narrow courts between the houses and stables were piled high with farm fertilizer, and the flies were a pest. The hospital authorities could not get the citizens to clean up the town. What had been the custom for centuries must always be custom, they thought.

The grumbling of the big guns on the battlefront was almost continuous, day and night. It got so that Ruth forgot the sound. At night, from the narrow window of her cell, she could see the white glare over the trenches far away. By day black specks swinging to and fro in the air marked the observation balloons. Occasionally a darting airplane attracted her to the window of her workroom.

Clair was kept dark at night. Scarcely the glimmer of a candle was allowed to shine forth from any window or doorway. There was a motion picture theater in the main street; but one had to creep to it by guess, and perhaps blunder in at the door of the grocer’s shop, or the wine merchant’s, before finding the picture show.

By day and night the French aircraft and the anti-aircraft guns were ready to fight off enemy airplanes. During the first weeks of Ruth Fielding’s sojourn in the town there were two warnings of German air raids at night. A deliberate attempt more than once had been made to bomb the Red Cross hospital.

Ruth was frightened. The first alarm came after she was in bed. She dressed hurriedly and ran down into the nearest ward. But there was no bustle there. The ringing of the church bells and the blowing of the alarm siren had not disturbed the patients here, and she saw Miss Simone, the night nurse, quietly going about her duties as though there was no stir outside.

Ruth remembered Charlie Bragg’s statement of the case: “If they get you they get you, and that’s all there is to it!” And she was ashamed to show fear in the presence of the nurse.

The French drove off the raider that time. The second time the German dropped bombs in the town, but nobody was hurt, and he did not manage to drop the bombs near the hospital. Ruth was glad that she felt less panic in this second raid than before.

Thinking of Charlie Bragg must have brought that young man to see her. He came to the hospital on his rest day; and then later appeared driving his ambulance and asked her to ride.

The red cross she wore gave authority for Ruth’s presence in the ambulance, and nobody questioned their object in driving through the back roads and lanes beyond Clair.

The country here was not torn up by marmite holes, or the chasms made by the Big Berthas. Such a lovely, quiet country as it was! Were it not for the steady grumbling of the guns Ruth Fielding could scarcely have believed that there was such a thing as war.

But it was not likely that Ruth would ride much with Charlie Bragg for the mere pleasure of it. The young fellow drove at top speed at all times, whether the road was smooth or rutted.

“Really, I can’t help it, Miss Ruth,” he declared. “Got the habit. We fellows want always to get as far as we can with our loads before something breaks down, or a shell gets us.

“By the way, seen anything of the werwolf again?”

“Mercy! No. Do you suppose we did really see anything that night?”

“Don’t know. I know there was an attack made upon this sector two nights after that, and a raid on an artillery base that we were keeping particularly secret from the Boches. Somebody must have told them.”

“The Germans are always flying over and photographing everything,” said Ruth doubtfully.

“Not that battery. Had it camouflaged and only worked on it nights. The Boches put a barrage right behind it and sent over troops who did a lot of damage.

“Believe me! You don’t know to what lengths these German spies and German-lovers go. You don’t know who is true and who is false about you. And the most ingenious schemes they have,” added Charlie.

“They have tried secret wireless right here – within two miles. But the radio makes too much noise and is sure to be spotted at last. In one place telegraph wires were carried for several miles through the bed of a stream and the spy on this side walked about with the telegraph instrument in his pocket. When he got a chance he went to the hut near the river bank, where the ends of the wire were insulated, and tapped out his messages.

“And pigeons! Don’t say a word. They’re flying all the time, and sometimes they are shot and the quills found under their wings. I tell you spies just swarm all along this front.”

“Then,” Ruth said, ruminatingly, “it must have been a dog we saw that night.”

“The werwolf?” asked Charlie, with a grin.

“That is nonsense. It is a dog trained to run between the spy on this side and somebody behind the German lines. Poor dog!”

“Wow!” ejaculated the young fellow with disgust. “Isn’t that just like a girl? ‘Poor dog,’ indeed!”

“Why! you don’t suppose that a noble dog would want to be a spy?” cried Ruth. “You can scarcely imagine a dog choosing any tricky way through life. It is only men who deliberately choose despicable means to despicable ends.”

“Hold on! Hold on!” cried Charlie Bragg. “Spies are necessary – as long as there is going to be war, anyway. The French have got quite as brave and successful spies beyond the German lines as the Germans have over here; only not so many.”

“Well – I suppose that’s so,” admitted Ruth, sighing. “There must be these terrible things as long as the greater terrible thing, war, exists. Oh! There is the chateau gateway. Drive slower, Mr. Bragg – do, please!”

They mounted a little rise in the road. Above they had seen the walls and towers of the chateau, and had seen them clearly for some time. But now the boundary wall of the estate edged the road, and an arched gateway, with high grilled gates and a small door set into the wall beside the wider opening, came into view.

A single thought had stung Ruth Fielding’s mind, but she did not utter it. It was: Why had none of the German aviators dropped bombs upon the stone towers on the hill? Was it a fact that the enemy deliberately ignored the existence of the chateau – that somebody in that great pile of masonry won its immunity from German bombs by playing the traitor to France and her cause?

Charlie had really reduced the speed of the car until it was now only crawling up the slope of the road. Something fluttered at the postern-gate – a woman’s petticoat.

“There’s the old woman,” said Charlie, “Take a good look at her.”

“You don’t mean the countess?” gasped Ruth.

“Whiskers! No!” chuckled the young fellow. “She’s a servant – or something. Dresses like one of these French peasants about here. And yet she isn’t French!”

“You have seen her before, then,” murmured Ruth.

“Twice. There! Look at her mustache, will you? She looks like a grenadier.”

The woman at the gate was a tall, square-shouldered woman, with a hard, lined and almost masculine countenance. She stared with gloomy look as the Red Cross ambulance rolled by. Ruth caught Charlie’s arm convulsively.

“Oh! what was that?” she again whispered, looking back at the woman in the gateway.

“What was what?” he asked.

“That – something white – behind her – inside the gate! Why, Mr. Bragg! was it a dog?”

“The werwolf,” chuckled the young chauffeur.

CHAPTER XVIII – SHOCKING NEWS

From both Helen and Jennie letters reached the girl of the Red Mill quite frequently. Ruth saw that always her correspondence was opened and read by the censor; but that was the fate of all letters that came to Clair.

“We innocents,” said the matron of the hospital, “are thus afflicted because of the plague of spies – a veritable Egyptian plague! – that infests this part of my country. Do not be troubled, Mam’zelle Americaine. You are not singled out as though your friendliness to France was questioned.

“And yet there may be those working in the guise of the Red Cross who betray their trust,” the woman added. “I hear of such.”

“Who are they? Where?” Ruth asked eagerly.

“It is said that at Lyse many of the supplies sent to the Red Cross from your great and charitable country, Mam’zelle, have been diverted to private dealers and sold to the citizens. Oh, our French people – some of them – are hungry for the very luxuries that the blessés should have. If they have money they will spend it freely if good things are to be bought.”

“At Lyse!” repeated Ruth. “Where I came from?”

“Fear not that suspicion rests on you, ma chère amie,” cooed the Frenchwoman. “Indeed, no person in the active service of the Red Cross at Lyse is suspected.”

“Nobody suspected in the supply department?” asked Ruth doubtfully.

“Oh, no! The skirts of all are clear, I understand.”

Ruth said no more, but she was vastly worried by what she had heard. What, really, had taken place at Lyse? If a conspiracy had been discovered for the robbing of the Red Cross Supply Department, were not Mrs. Mantel and Legrand and José engaged in it?

Yet it seemed that the woman in black was not suspected. Ruth tried to learn more of the particulars, but the matron of the Clair hospital did not appear to know more than she had already stated.

Ruth wrote to Clare Biggars immediately, asking about the rumored trouble in their department of the Red Cross at Lyse; but naturally there would be delay before she could receive a reply, even if the censor allowed the information to go through the mails.

Meanwhile Clair was shaken all through one day and night by increased artillery fire on the battle front. Never had Ruth Fielding heard the guns roll so terribly. It was as though a continuous thunderstorm shook the heavens and the earth.

The Germans tried to drive back the reserves behind the French trenches with the heaviest barrage fire thus far experienced along this sector, while they sent forward their shock troops to overcome the thin French line in the dugouts.

Here and there the Germans gained a footing in the front line of the French trenches; but always they were driven out again, or captured.

The return barrage from the French guns at last created such havoc among the German troops that what remained of the latter were forced back beyond their own front lines.

The casualties were frightful. News of the raging battle came in with every ambulance to the Clair Hospital. The field hospitals were overcrowded and the wounded were being taken immediately from the dressing stations behind the trenches to the evacuation hospitals, like this of Clair, before being operated upon.

This well-conducted institution, in which Ruth had been busy for so many weeks, became in a few hours a bustling, feverish place, with only half enough nurses and fewer doctors than were needed.

Ruth offered herself to the matron and was given charge of one ward for all of one night, while the surgeons and nurses battled in the operating room and in the dangerous wards, with the broken men who were brought in.

Ruth’s ward was a quiet one. She had already learned what to do in most small emergencies. Besides, these patients were, most of them, well on toward recovery, and they slept in spite of what was going on downstairs.

On this night Clair was astir and alight. The peril of an air raid was forgotten as the ambulances rolled in from the north and east. The soft roads became little better than quagmires for it had rained during a part of the day.

Occasionally Ruth went to an open window and looked down at the entrance to the hospital yard, where the lantern light danced upon the glistening cobblestones. Here the ambulances, one after another, halted, while the stretcher-bearers and guards said but little; all was in monotone. But the steady sound of human voices in dire pain could not be hushed.

Some of the wounded were delirious when they were brought in. Perhaps they were better off.

Nor was Ruth Fielding’s sympathy altogether for the wounded soldiers. It was, as well, for these young men who drove the ambulances – who took their lives in their hands a score of times during the twenty-four hours as they forced their ambulances as near as possible to the front to recover the broken men. She prayed for the ambulance drivers.

Hour after hour dragged by until it was long past midnight. There had been a lull in the procession of ambulances for a time; but suddenly Ruth saw one shoot out of the gloom of the upper street and come rushing down to the gateway of the hospital court.

This machine was stopped promptly and the driver leaned forward, waving something in his hand toward the sentinel.

“Hey!” cried a voice that Ruth recognized – none other than that of Charlie Bragg. “Is Miss Fielding still here?”

He asked this in atrocious French, but the sentinel finally understood him.

“I will inquire, Monsieur.”

“Never mind the inquiring business,” declared Charlie Bragg. “I’ve got to be on my way. I know she’s here. Get this letter in to her, will you? We’re taking ’em as far as Lyse now, old man. Nice long roll for these poor fellows who need major operations.”

He threw in his clutch again and the ambulance rocked away. Ruth left the window and ran down to the entrance hall. The sentinel was just coming up the steps with the note in his hand. Before Ruth reached the man she saw that the envelope was stained with blood!

“Oh! Is that for me?” the girl gasped, reaching out for it.

“Quite so, Mam’zelle,” and the man handed it to her with a polite gesture.

Ruth seized it, and, with only half-muttered thanks, ran back to her ward. Her heart beat so for a minute that she felt stifled. She could not imagine what the note could be, or what it was about.

Yet she had that intuitive feeling of disaster that portends great and overwhelming events. Her thought was of Tom – Tom Cameron! Who else would send her a letter from the direction of the battle line?

She sank into her chair by the shaded lamp behind the nurse’s screen. For a time she could not even look at the letter again, with its stain of blood so plain upon it!

Then she brought it into line with her vision and with the lamplight streaming upon it. The bloody finger marks half effaced something that was written upon the face of the envelope in a handwriting strange to Ruth.

“This was found in tunic pocket of an American – badly wounded – evacuated to L – . His identification tag lost, as his arm was torn off at elbow, and no tag around his neck.”

This brief statement was unsigned. Some kindly Red Cross worker, perhaps, had written it. Charlie Bragg must have known that the letter was addressed to Ruth and offered to bring it to her at Clair, the American on whom the letter was found having been unconscious.

The flap on the envelope had not been sealed. With trembling fingers the girl drew the paper forth. Yes! It was in Tom Cameron’s handwriting, and it began: “Dear Ruth Fielding.”

In his usual jovial style the letter proceeded. It had evidently been written just before Tom had been called to active duty in the trenches.

There were no American troops in the battle line, as yet, Ruth well knew. But their officers, in small squads, were being sent forward to learn what it meant to be in the trenches under fire.

And Tom had been caught in this sudden attack! Evacuated to Lyse! The field hospitals, as well as this one at Clair, were overcrowded. It was a long way to take wounded men to Lyse to be operated upon.

“Operated upon!” The thought made Ruth shudder. She turned sick and dizzy. Tom Cameron crippled and unconscious! An arm torn off! A cripple for the rest of his life!

She looked at the bloody fingerprints on the envelope. Tom’s blood, perhaps.

He was being taken to Lyse, where nobody would know him and he would know nobody! Oh, why had it not been his fate to be brought to this hospital at Clair where Ruth was stationed?

There was a faint call from one of the patients. It occurred twice before the girl aroused to its significance.

She must put aside her personal fears and troubles. She was here to attend to the ward while the regular night nurse was engaged elsewhere.

Because Tom Cameron was wounded – perhaps dying – she could not neglect her duty here. She went quietly and brought a drink of cool water to the feverish and restless blessé who had called.

CHAPTER XIX – AT THE WAYSIDE CROSS

The early hours of that morning were the most tedious that Ruth Fielding ever had experienced. She was tied here to the convalescent ward of the Clair Hospital, while her every thought was bent upon that rocking ambulance that might be taking the broken body of Tom Cameron to the great base hospital at Lyse.

Was it possible that Tom was in Charlie Bragg’s car? What might not happen to the ambulance on the dark and rough road over which Ruth had once ridden with the young American chauffeur.

While she was looking out of the window at the ambulance as it halted at the gateway of the hospital court, was poor Tom, unconscious and wounded, in Charlie’s car? Oh! had she but suspected it! Would she not have run down and insisted that Tom be brought in here where she might care for him?

Her heart was wrung by this possibility. She felt condemned that she had not suspected Tom’s presence at the time! Had not felt his nearness to her!

Helen was far away in Paris. Already Mr. Cameron was on the high seas. There was nobody here so close to Tom as Ruth herself. Nor could anybody else do more for him than Ruth, if only she could find him!

The battle clouds and storm clouds both broke in the east with the coming of the clammy dawn. She saw the promise of a fair day just before sunrise; then the usual morning fog shut down, shrouding all the earth about the town. It would be noon before the sun could suck up this moisture.

Two hours earlier than expected the day nurse came to relieve her. Ruth was thankful to be allowed to go. Having spent the night here she would not be expected to serve in her own department that day. Yet she wished to see the matron and put to her a request.

It was much quieter downstairs when she descended. A nodding nurse in the hall told her that every bed and every cot in the hospital was filled. Some of the convalescents would be removed as soon as possible so as to make room for newly wounded poilus.

“But where is the matron?”

“Ah, the good mother has gone to her bed – quite fagged out. Twenty-four hours on her feet – and she is no longer young. If I can do anything for the Americaine mademoiselle – ?”

But Ruth told her no. She would write a note for Madame la Directrice, to be given to her when she awoke. For the girl of the Red Mill was determined to follow a plan of her own.

By rights she should be free until the next morning. There were twenty-four hours before her during which she need not report for service. Had she not learned of Tom’s trouble she doubtless would have taken a short nap and then appeared to help in any department where she might be of use.

But, to Ruth’s mind, Tom’s need was greater than anything else just then. In her walks about Clair she had become acquainted with a French girl who drove a motor-car – Henriette Dupay. Her father was one of the larger farmers, and the family lived in a beautiful old house some distance out of town. Ruth made a brief toilet, a briefer breakfast, and ran out of the hospital, taking the lane that led to the Dupay farm.

The fog was so thick close to the ground that she could not see people in the road until she was almost upon them. But, then, it was so early that not many even of the early-rising farmers were astir.

In addition, the night having been so racked with the sounds of the guns, – now dying out, thank heaven! – and the noise of the ambulances coming in from the front and returning thereto, that most of the inhabitants of Clair were exhausted and slept late.

The American girl, well wrapped in a cloak and with an automobile veil wound about her hat and pulled down to her ears, walked on hurriedly, stopping now and then at a crossroad to make sure she was on the right track.

If Henriette Dupay could get her father’s car, and would drive Ruth to Lyse, the latter would be able to assure herself about Tom one way or another. She felt that she must know just how badly the young fellow was wounded!

To think! An arm torn off at the elbow – if it was really Tom who had been picked up with the note Ruth had received in his pocket. It was dreadful to think of.

At one point in her swift walk Ruth found herself sobbing hysterically. Yet she was not a girl who broke down easily. Usually she was selfcontrolled. Helen accused her sometimes of being even phlegmatic.

She took a new grip upon herself. Her nerves must not get the best of her! It might not be Tom Cameron at all who was wounded. There were other American officers mixed in with the French troops on this sector of the battle front – surely!

Yet, who else but Tom would have carried that letter written to “Dear Ruth Fielding”? The more the girl of the Red Mill thought of it the more confident she was that there could have been no mistake made. Tom had fallen wounded in the trenches and was now in the big hospital at Lyse, where she had worked for some weeks in the ranks of the Red Cross recruits.

Suddenly the girl was halted by a voice in the fog. A shrill exclamation in a foreign tone – not French – sounded just ahead. It was a man’s voice, and a woman’s answered. The two seemed to be arguing; but to hear people talking in anything but French or English in this part of France was enough to astonish anybody.

“That is not German. It is a Latin tongue,” thought the girl, wonderingly. “Italian or Spanish, perhaps. Who can it be?”

She started forward again, yet walked softly, for the moss and short grass beside the road made her footfalls indistinguishable a few yards away. There loomed up ahead of her a wayside cross – one of those weather-worn and ancient monuments so often seen in that country.

In walking with Henriette Dupay, Ruth had seen the French girl kneel a moment at this junction of the two lanes, and whisper a prayer. Indeed, the American girl had followed her example, for she believed that God hears the reverent prayer wherever it is made. And Ruth had felt of late that she had much to pray for.

The voices of the two wrangling people suggested no worship, however. Nor were they kneeling at the wayside shrine. She saw them, at last, standing in the middle of the cross lane. One, she knew, had come down from the chateau.

Ruth saw that the woman was the heavy-faced creature whom she had once seen at the gateway of the chateau when riding past with Charlie Bragg. This strange-looking old woman Charlie had said was a servant of the countess up at the chateau and that she was not a Frenchwoman. Indeed, the countess herself was not really French, but was Alsatian, and “the wrong kind,” to use the chauffeur’s expression.

The American girl caught a glimpse of the woman’s face and then hid her own with her veil. But the man’s countenance she did not behold until she had passed the shrine and had looked back.

He had wheeled to look after Ruth. He was a small man and suddenly she saw, as he stepped out to trace her departure more clearly, that he was lame. He wore a heavy shoe on one foot with a thick and clumsy sole-such as the supposed Italian chef had worn coming over from America on the Red Cross ship.

Was it the man, José, suspected with Legrand and Mrs. Rose Mantel – all members of a band of conspirators pledged to rob the Red Cross? Ruth dared not halt for another glance at him. She pulled the veil further over her face and scuttled on up the lane toward the Dupay farmhouse.