"Will anyone be kind enough to lift me off my horse?" said old General Strangways, when riding to an exposed position in the hope of being able to see something of what his men were doing, a shell literally blew off his leg. And someone lifted him down doubtless; but there were eight generals to be seen to, and close on a hundred and fifty officers.
"It does not do to dwell upon the aspect of the battlefield." True, indeed, when out of the eight thousand some two thousand six hundred lay dead or wounded among the fourteen thousand Russians for whom they had accounted.
Even Doctor Forsyth's pale, composed face grew paler, less composed, and Marrion acting as his _aide_ could scarcely get through the awful days. She could not work as she wished to work, but neither could she rest. Her whole being seemed to go out in one vast pity for the world, a vast desire to protect, to recreate.
"I am sorry my hand shook," she said, almost pitifully to the doctor, when she held she had failed to give him all the help she should have done over a young lad who had been brought in badly hurt. "But he seemed so very young. It made me think of the time when all these poor boys were babies in their mothers' arms, warm, secure, sheltered."
"You did very well," he said. "Not quite so well as usual, perhaps; but better than others. For all that, I am going to send you for a rest--only a week or two," he added hastily, seeing her face set in denial. "And it's as useful as anything else. You know there are quite a lot of soldiers' wives down in the town. There ought not to be, of course, but there are---- Why, there is one, at least, in the camp! And one, an Irishwoman, has just died with her third baby--shock--husband killed. And there is no one to see to them and others. You'd better go--you--you like children."
To tell the truth Marrion felt a strange gladness at the thought of them, and the very idea of holding the newborn scrap of humanity in her arms was enthralling.
"For a week," she demurred. "You see I haven't been sleeping well."
So down by the sea in a house built on the very rocks of the harbour she went back to woman's normal life and rested for a while.
For the first time she had leisure to notice the beauties of the cliff-set coast, of which the bay was a mere shallow curve. The vessels lying at the roads bobbed and swayed when the wind ruffled the water, almost as if they had been at sea. But it was fine to see them there; ships of the line, merchantmen, gun-boats, mail-steamers, all coming and going. When the two elder children were asleep, Marrion would wrap the infant in a blanket and go and sit on the rocks in the sunshine, watching the boats go backwards and forwards to the shore, and thinking of the far-off Aberdeenshire days when she could pull an oar with any man. The harbour itself, a mere inlet, was crammed with vessels of all descriptions; you could scarcely distinguish one from the other, but the thirty outside showed bravely.