Red and Black by Grece S. Richmond — Read

The Field Hospital in which Jane was at work was now seeing its busiest days. A steady stream of wounded men poured into it, day and night, frequently augmented after a serious engagement at the Front by such a torrent of extra cases that every resource was heavily overtaxed. Surgeons and nurses worked to the limit and beyond it; they kept on long after they should have been released. In Jane's whole experience in this place no doctor or nurse ever gave up and was sent to the rear until actually forced to do so, by pure physical inability longer to continue. It was amazing how endurance held out, when the need was great, by sheer force of nerve and will. Yet the strain told, and it showed more and more in the worn faces of those upon whom the responsibility fell heaviest.

At a time when the situation was most trying, and the whole hospital force was exhausting itself with effort to cover the demand, a visitor appeared upon the scene who changed the face of things in an hour. He was a surgeon from a famous Base Hospital, himself distinguished both in America, from which he came, and in France, where he had been long serving far in advance of most of his countrymen. He had chosen to spend a brief leave from his work in visiting various Field Hospitals and Casualty Clearing Stations, and on account of his reputation for remarkable success in his own branch of regional surgery his visits had been welcomed and made the most of by his colleagues in the profession.