“So I fixed my sights, and we both fired out of the window with our rifles resting on the ledge.  As I drew back I saw there was something queer with the boy, and noticed a splash of red on the lobe of his ear, just like a coral bead.

“‘Did they wing you?’ I asked.  And even as I spoke, he staggered against the wall and turned round so that I saw him full in the face.  There was a hole in the other side, just at the cheek bone, that I could have put my finger in.  He had been shot clear through the head.

“‘Poor chap,’ I said, and lifted him over behind the chimney, where I had been.  He didn’t speak.  I left him there and went to the door, thinking that I might see a Red Cross nurse somewhere about, and sure enough, there was one bending over a man stretched on the ground.  It was the major who had been giving us the ranges.

“‘Is he hurt bad?’ I asked.

“The Red Cross man had the major’s shirt open, looking at his wound.  ‘He’s shot through the heart,’ he said.

“’Can you come in here a minute, when you get through with him?  There’s a Thirteenth boy just been hit.’

“‘Hit where?’

“‘In the head.’

“‘Hold him by the jowls,’ he said, ‘until I come,’ So I held him by the jowls, and then he spoke for the first time, and what he said was this:  ‘Say, Seventy-one, I done my duty, didn’t I?’

“I told him that he did.

“’I had my face toward ’em when they got me, didn’t I?

“‘Sure, you did.’

“‘Well,’ he went on, quite cheerful like, ’I may get through this, and if I do, I’ll have another crack at ’em.  But if I don’t, why I aint got no kick comin’, for there’ll be others to stay here with me.’

“That was the last I saw of him, for the Red Cross man came in then, and I went back to the firing.  He was a game boy, though, wasn’t he?”

[Illustration:  The “Red Cross” in the Field.]

What would have become of the wounded if the Red Cross nurses had not been on the field to help them, nobody knows, except that thousands of “mothers’ boys” were saved, who in a few hours more would have been beyond mortal aid.  No wonder bearded men wept like babies and blessed the angels of mercy as they passed.  The boys went into the fight hungry, lay for two days in trenches, almost without food; and when they were wounded, were ordered to make their way to the rear as best they could.  Men with desperate wounds had to walk or crawl perhaps a mile; perhaps five or six miles, over the wild, rough country, those who were least injured, assisting their comrades, and hundreds dying by the wayside.  Had the Red Cross been allowed its way in the beginning, many of these horrors would have been avoided.  The few army surgeons did all in their power, but nearly everything they-needed to allay suffering was lacking, and so insufficient was the force that many of the wounded lay for days before their turn came.  Men taken from the operating table, perhaps having just had a leg or arm cut off, or with bodies torn by bullets, were laid naked on the rain-soaked ground, without shelter, and in the majority of cases without even blankets.  And there they lay through two long days and nights.  All honor to the Red Cross Society which finally forced its way to the spot and knew exactly what to do.