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"Yes, he came into the trenches a week ago and gave us cakes and cigars." "But that was jolly sporting of him, wasn't it?" "He can keep his cigars he doesn't have to lie in shell holes for days on end." "War's no good," said a small man with a protruding forehead and keen eyes and wearing a red-cross on his arm.
From east, west, north, and south the deadly iron messengers had come, making sore havoc of this poor house of Christ. "When the walls fall about our ears, Colonel," the Mother-Superior had declared, "it will be time to leave them." They were lacework now, with a confusion of bare rafters overhead, over which streamed, as if in mockery, the Red-Cross Flag.
I had, be it said, a semi-military appearance, for my grey frieze coat was frogged, and besides, what was more important, I wore the red-cross armlet given me at the time when I followed Gougeard's column. Almost immediately afterwards the train full of soldiers got away. The cannonade was now very loud, and the glass roof above us constantly vibrated.
Kit, crouching in a heap close by, noticed his boots, old, split across the toe, dingy white socks showing through. He found himself wondering whether the man had corns. Clinging to the stump the Frenchman drew his sword, and looked up at the red-cross flag flapping sullen defiance overhead. "Dans le nom de l'Empereur!" he cried pompously.
Without the upholding sense of duty, no man can be sure of his own behaviour, simply because he cannot be sure of his own nerves. Duty kept the red-cross knight "forlorne and left to losse," "haplesse and eke hopelesse," "Disarmd, disgraste, and inwardly dismayde, And eke so faint in every joynt and vayne,"
Now and then, he vanished to look after the creature comforts of The Nig and the little gray broncho; now and then he shuffled forward to demand news from some passer-by whose sleeve was banded with the Red-Cross badge. Then he shuffled back to his former post and sat himself down on his heels once more. Kruger Bobs possessed the racial traits which make it an easy matter to sit and wait for news.
He does not object to killing women or sick people, nor does he observe with any standing scrupulousness the Geneva Convention. Any object that shows up nicely on the skyline is good enough to pound away at, and the Red-Cross Flag has often helped him to get a satisfactory range.
Its destination was the West Indies, where it was to attack the colonies of Spain, while we were to capture and destroy her fleets on her coasts. This work, however, was not to commence for the present. We having reached the roadstead of Cadiz, found there a Dutch fleet. No sooner was the red-cross seen flying from our mastheads, than the Dutch admiral lowered his flag.
I forget most of the lines they were probably great trash, but I hugged them to my bosom as a young mother does her first child. 'Twas sunset in the lone Pacific world, The rich gleams fading in the western sky; Within the still Lagoon the sails were furled, The red-cross flag alone was flaunting high. Before them was the low and palm-fringed shore, Behind, the outer ocean's baffled roar.
Presently we passed an open trolley with a huge red-cross flag flying, but which appeared to contain nothing but private luggage, and was followed by a man, evidently a doctor, driving a one-horse buggy, and wearing an enormous red-cross badge on his hat.
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