Dr. Small had taken something off the mantelpiece--a glass tube with some tablets--which he put in his pocket. “Hysteria,” he said. “Starvation, war-strain, and--drugs. There’s a jolly combination for a young lady’s nerves! She’s afraid of herself, old ghosts, the horrors. Wants to run away from it all, forgetting that she carries her poor body and brain with her. I know the symptoms--even in little old New York in time of peace.” He had his professional manner. I saw the doctor through his soldier’s uniform. He spoke with the authority of the medical man in a patient’s bedroom. He ordered me to go round to my mess and bring back some food, while he boiled up a kettle and got busy. When I returned, after half-an-hour, the girl was more cheerful. Some of the horrors had passed from her, in the doctor’s company. She ate some of the food I had brought in a famished way, but after a few mouthfuls sickened at it and would eat no more. But a faint colour had come into her cheeks and gave her face a touch of real beauty. She must have been extraordinarily attractive before the war--as those photographs showed. She spoke of Pierre with adoration. He had been all that was good to her before she left home (she hated her mother!) to sing in cabarets and café concerts. “I cannot imagine Pierre as a lieutenant!” she remarked with a queer little laugh. Dr. Small said he would get some women in the house to look after her in the night, but she seemed hostile to that idea. “The people here are unkind. They are bad women here. If I died they would not care.” She promised to stay in the house until we could arrange for Pierre to meet her and take her away to Paris. But I felt the greatest pity for the girl when we left her alone in her miserable room. The scared look had come back to her face. I could see that she was in terror of being alone again. When we walked back to our billets the doctor spoke of the extraordinary chance of meeting the girl like that--the sister of our liaison officer. The odds were a million to one against such a thing. “I always feel there’s a direction in these cases,” said Daddy Small. “Some Hand that guides. Maybe you and I were being led to-night. I’d like to save that girl, Marthe.” “Is that her name?” “Marthe de Méricourt, she calls herself, as a singing-girl. I guess that’s why Pierre could not hear of her in this town.” Later on the doctor spoke again. “That girl is as much a war-victim as if she had been shell-shocked on the field of battle. The casualty-lists don’t say anything about civilians, not a darned thing about broken hearts, stricken women, diseased babies, infant mortality; all the hell of suffering behind the lines. May God curse all war devils!” He put his hand on my shoulder and said in a very solemn way: “After this thing is finished--this grisly business--you and I, and all men of goodwill, must put our heads together to prevent it happening again. I dedicate whatever life I have to that.”