"Rinehart, Mary Roberts - The Amazing Interlude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rinehart Mary Roberts)

of it. But here - yesterday I cut the clothes off a wounded Belgian boy.
He had been forty-eight hours on a railway siding, without even soup or
coffee."

It was early in the war then, and between Ypres and the sea stretched a
long thin line of Belgian trenches. A frantic Belgian Government, thrust
out of its own land, was facing the problem, with scant funds and with no
materiel of any sort, for feeding that desolate little army. France had
her own problems - her army, non-productive industrially, and the great
and constantly growing British forces quartered there, paying for what
they got, but requiring much. The world knows now of the starvation of
German-occupied Belgium. What it does not know and may never know is of
the struggle during those early days to feed the heroic Belgian Army in
their wet and almost untenable trenches.

Hospital trains they could improvise out of what rolling stock remained
to them. Money could be borrowed, and was. But food? Clothing?
Ammunition? In his little villa on the seacoast the Belgian King knew
that his soldiers were hungry, and paced the floor of his tiny
living-room; and over in an American city whose skyline was as pointed
with furnace turrets as Constantinople's is with mosques, over there
Sara Lee heard that call of hunger, and - put on her engagement ring.

Later on that evening, with Harvey's wide cheerful face turned adoringly
to her, Sara Lee formulated a question:

"Don't you sometimes feel as though you'd like to go to France and fight?"

"What for?"

"Well, they need men, don't they?"

"I guess they don't need me, honey. I'd be the dickens of a lot of use!
Never fired a gun in my life."

"You could learn. It isn't hard."

Harvey sat upright and stared at her.

"Oh, if you want me to go -" he said, and waited.

Sara Lee twisted her ring on her finger.

"Nobody wants anybody to go," she said not very elegantly. "I'd just
- I'd rather like to think you wanted to go."

That was almost too subtle for Harvey. Something about him was rather
reminiscent of Uncle James on mornings when he was determined not to
go to church.