n view of her intensity, he waited for her to
speak.

"You will let us do something for them?" Marta asked. "We will make them
some hot soup."

He was immediately businesslike. No less than Dellarme or Fracasse or
Lanstron or Westerling, he had been preparing throughout his
professional career for this hour. The detail of caring for the men who
were down had been worked out no less systematically than that of
wounding them.

"Thank you, no! We don't want to waste time," he replied. "We must get
them away with all speed so that the ambulances may return promptly.
It's only a fifteen-minute run to the hospital, where every comfort and
appliance are ready and where they will be given the right things to
eat."

"Then we will give them some wine!" Marta persisted.

"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 c