She looked at her little service watch--it was just past four. She must go back: it would not be long now before the ambulances would be rushing in with the fresh wounded sent back from that angry sky-line. The stretcher-bearers would be setting their woeful burdens down before her, and all she had to give must be theirs, for the hour.
For a moment she closed her eyes. She still held the letter in her hand; she lifted it and laid her cheek against it; then she pressed it to her lips.
“Oh, wherever you are,” she breathed, “I think you need me. I think you are thinking of me. But whether you are or not--I’m there.--Oh, Robert Black--_I’m there_!”
In a narrow, winding, muddy ditch--which was all it was, though it went by another name--with short, ladder-like places for the ascent of its sides here and there, Robert Black was waiting, with a detachment of his men, for a certain hour, minute and second previously fixed by orders received in the early evening. He was at a crisis in his experience which he had known would come some day, but it had been long delayed. Now it was at hand. These men with whom he had been stationed, throughout their voyage overseas, their foreign training, and their slow and tedious progress toward the French Front, were about to receive their first real test. At that fixed early morning hour they were going for the first time “over the top.”
By now Black knew most of them pretty well. In the beginning they had received him cautiously, watching him closely, as a man who comes to a regiment with a cross on his collar is bound to be watched. They hadn’t particularly liked their former chaplain, whose place Black had taken at almost the last hour before they sailed. This man had never been able to get very near to them, though he had tried conscientiously and persistently to do so. They weren’t exactly prejudiced against chaplains--they supposed they were somehow necessary and unavoidable adjuncts of military service--but they didn’t see so very much use in having them at all. So when Black came they had looked him over curiously and not without a certain amount of prejudgment.
The voyage over had been a rough one; a large proportion of the men had been seasick. Black, who had crossed the Atlantic many times on those trips back home to see his mother, was a first-rate sailor, and he had had his first chance with his men during those long days of storm and wet and dark discomfort. He had made the most of it, though he had taken care not to overdo the effort to bring cheer to those who if not seasick were mostly homesick, whether they succeeded in concealing it or not. He had gone about quietly but efficiently, and the impression he had given had been that of one who had cast in his lot with his regiment for better or for worse, though he wasn’t making any fuss about it.