“Not if we can prevent it!  Not to start hemorrhages!  The field doctors have brandy for use when advisable, and there is brandy with all the ambulances.”

Clearly, volunteer service was not wanted.  There was no room at the immediate front for Florence Nightingales in the modern machine of war.

“Then water?”

The major surgeon aimed to be patient to an earnest, attractive young woman.

“We have sterilized water—­we have everything,” he explained.  “If we hadn’t at this early stage I ought to be serving an apprenticeship in a village apothecary shop.  Anything that means confusion, delay, unnecessary excitement is bad and unmerciful.”

Marta was not yet at the end of her resources.  The recollection of the dying private who had asked her mother for a rose in the last war flashed into mind.

“You haven’t flowers!  They won’t do any harm, even if they aren’t sterilized.  The wounded like flowers, don’t they?  Don’t you like flowers?  Look!  We’ve millions!”

“Yes, I do.  They do.  A good idea.  Bring all the flowers you want to.”

The major surgeon’s smile to Marta was not altogether on account of her suggestion.  “It ought to help anybody who was ever wounded anywhere in the world to have you give him a flower!” he was thinking.

She ran for an armful of blossoms and was back before the arrival of the first wounded man who preceded the stretchers on foot.  He was holding up a hand bound in a white first-aid bandage which had a red spot in the centre.  Those hit in hand or arm, if the surgeon’s glance justified it, were sent on up the road to a point a mile distant, where transportation in requisitioned vehicles was provided.  These men were triumphant in their cheerfulness.  They were alive; they had done their duty, and they had the proof of it in the coming souvenirs of scars.

Some of the forms on stretchers had peaceful faces in unconsciousness of their condition.  Others had a look of wonder, of pain, of apprehension in their consciousness that death might be near.  The single word “Shrapnel!” by a hospital-corps corporal told the story of crushed or lacerated features, in explanation of a white cloth covering a head with body uninjured.

Feller, strolling out into the garden under the spell of watching shell bursts, saw what Marta was doing.  With the same feeling of relief at opportunity for action that she had felt, he hastened to assist her, bringing flowers by the basketful and pausing to watch her distribute them—­watching her rather than the wounded and enjoying incidental thrills at examples of the efficiency of artillery fire.

“The guns—­the guns are going to play a great part!” he thought.  “These rapid-firers will recover all the artillery’s prestige of Napoleon’s time!”

Many of the wounded themselves looked at Marta even more than at the flowers.  It was good to see the face of a woman, her eyes limpid with sympathy, and it was not what she said but the way she spoke that brought smiles in response to hers.  For she was no solemn ministering angel, but high-spirited, cheery, of the sort that the major surgeon would have chosen to distribute flowers to the men.  Every remark of the victims of war made its distinct and indelible impression on the gelatine of her mind.