Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/26

8 "Instead of that she dragged me to Rouen. You need another wrap, my dear."

The girl shook her head.

"So I went back," she continued, “crying through the dark streets with that strange officer. Half way I stopped, remembering. I didn't have a cent. My husband hadn't given me any money. You see we had been married such a little while. We hadn't learned to think of such things."

She spoke of her interminable days of waiting in Rouen. She had been on the point of winning for her husband a staff appointment with its lighter dangers, when the word, hourly expected, had been delivered to her.

"Oh, quite brutally," she said. "I didn't know what it meant, death or a wound. I only knew I must go, so I persuaded a high officer to give me a pass for a military train. I spent a lifetime on that train. During many hours it crawled only a little ways. Finally they told me to get out. They drove me to a small hospital back of the lines. The odour of it And he lay there, a sister bending over him. She said I mustn't cry, and it was hard, because he didn't know me, because he seemed like one already dead."

Her voice dwindled, the mother stirred, then, as if to spare the girl, explained how she had drawn her husband from the black valley through