"Gee! Yes! If you'd go to see her! She talks a little English!" he
cried. He gave her the name and address, and when that poilu went back
to the front it was Ellen Boardman from Marshallton, Kansas, who walked
with him to the gate, who shook hands with him, who waved him a last
salute as he boarded his train.
The next night she did not go to the station. She went to see the wife.
The night after that she was sewing on a baby's wrapper as she sat in
the Gare de l'Est, turning her eyes away in shame from the intolerable
sorrow of those with families, watching for those occasional solitary or
very poor ones whom alone she ventured to approach with her timidly
proffered tokens of sympathy.
At the Y.W.C.A. opinions varied about her. She was patently to every eye
respectable to her last drop of pale blood. And yet _was_ it quite
respectable to go offering chocolate and writing-paper to soldiers you'd
never seen before? Everybody knew what soldiers were! Some one finally
decided smartly that her hat was a sufficient protection. It is true
that her hat was not becoming, but I do not think it was what saved her
from misunderstanding.
She did not always go to the Gare de l'Est every evening now. Sometimes
she spent them in the little dormer-windowed room where the wife of the
New York poilu waited for her baby. Several evenings she spent chasing
elusive information from the American Ambulance Corps as to exactly the
conditions in which a young man without money could come to drive an
ambulance in France ... the young man without money being of course the
reporter on the Marshallton _Herald_.
It chanced to be on one of the evenings when she was with the young wife
that the need came, that she went flying to get the mid-wife. She sat on
the stairs outside, after this, till nearly morning, shaken to her soul
by the cries within. When it was quiet, when the mid-wife let her in to
see the baby, she took the little new citizen of the Republic in her
arms, tears of mingled thanksgiving and dreadful fear raining down her
face, because another man-child had been born into the world. Would _he_
grow up only to say farewell at the Gare de l'Est? Oh, she was not sorry
that she had come to France to help in that war. She understood now, she
understood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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