"Supposing," she said, "they alter their range?"
"They won't alter it just for the fun of killing us. They haven't
spotted the batteries yet. It's the batteries they're trying for, not
the street."
But the little Belgian went on protesting.
"What's the matter with him?"
"He's getting a bit jumpy," she said, "that's all."
"Tell him to buck up. Tell him it's all right."
She translated. The little Belgian shook his head, mournfully persistent.
"Monsieur," he said, "didn't know."
"Oh yes, he does know."
It was absurd of the little man to suppose you didn't know, when
the noise of the French guns told them how near they were to the
enemy's target.
She tried not to listen to him. His mutterings broke up the queer
stillness that held her after she had heard the guns. It was only by
keeping still that you felt, wave by wave, the rising thrill of the
adventure. Only by keeping still she was aware of what was passing in
John's mind. He knew. He knew. They were one in the almost palpable
excitement that they shared; locked close, closer than their bodies could
have joined them, in the strange and poignant ecstasy of danger.
There was the sound of an explosion somewhere in front of them beyond
the houses.
"Did you hear that, Mademoiselle?"
"I did."
"Miles away," said John.
She knew it wasn't. She thought: He doesn't want me to know. He thinks
I'll be frightened. I mustn't tell him.
But the Belgian had none of John's scruples. The shell was near, he said;
very near. It had fallen in the place they were going to.
"But that's the place where the wounded men are."
He admitted that it was the place where the wounded men were.
They were out of the village now. Their road ran through flat open
country, a causeway raised a little above the level of the fields. No
cover anywhere from the fire if it came. The Belgian had begun again.
"What's that he's saying now?"
"He says we shall give away the position of the road."
"It's the one they told us to take. We've got to go on it. He's in a
beastly funk. That's what's the matter with him."
The Belgian shrugged his shoulders as much as to say he had done his duty
and things might now take their course, and they were mistaken if for one
minute they supposed he was afraid. But they had not gone fifty yards
before he begged to be put down. He said it was absolutely necessary that
he should go back to the village and collect the wounded there and have
them ready for the ambulance on its return.
They let him go. Charlotte looked round the corner of the hood and saw
him running with brief, jerky strides.
"He's got a nerve," said John, "to be able to do it."
"What excuse do you think he'll make?"
"Oh, he'll say we sent him."
The straight dyke of the road went on and on. Seen from the sunk German
lines the heavy ambulance car would look like a house on wheels running
along a wall. She thought again of John on his exposed seat. If only he
had let her drive--But that was absurd. Of course he wouldn't let her. If
you were to keep on thinking of the things that might happen to
John--Meanwhile nothing could take from them the delight of this
dangerous run across the open. She had to remind herself that the
adventure, the romance of it was not what mattered most; it was not the
real thing, the thing they had gone out for.
When they came to the wounded, when they came to the wounded, then it
would begin.
The hamlet began to show now; it sat on one side of the road, low and
alone in the flat land, an open field in front of it, and at the bottom
of the field the river and a line of willows, and behind the willows the
Germans, hidden. White smoke curled among the branches. You could see it
was an outpost, one of the points at which the Germans, if they broke
through, would come into the village. They supposed that the house where
the wounded men were would be the last of the short row.
Here on their right there were no houses, only the long, high flank of a
barn. The parts that had been built out into the field were shelled away,
but the outer wall by the roadside still held. It was all that stood
between them and the German guns. They drew up the car under its shelter
and got down.
They could see all the houses of the hamlet at once on their left;
whitewashed walls; slender grey doors and shutters. The three that
looked out on to the barn were untouched. A few yards ahead a small,
empty wine-shop faced the open field; its doorstep and the path in front
of its windows glittered with glass dust, with spikes and splinters, and
heaped shale of glass that slid and cracked under your feet. Beyond it,
a house with its door and all its windows and the front slope of its
roof blown in. A broken shutter sagged from the wall. Then the shell of
the last house; it pricked up one plastered gable, white and hard
against the blue.
They found the men in the last house but one, the house with the broken
shutter. They went, carrying their stretchers and the haversack of
dressings, under the slanted lintel into the room. The air in there was
hot and stifling and thickened with a grey powdery swarm. Their feet sank
through a layer of pinkish, greyish dust.
The three wounded men lay stretched out on this floor, among brickbats
and broken panes and slabs of dropped plaster. A thin grey powder had
settled on them all. And by the side of each man the dust was stiffened
into a red cake with a glairy pool in the middle of it, fed from the raw
wound; and where two men lay together their pools had joined and
overflowed in a thin red stream.
John put down his stretcher and stood still. His face was very white, and
his upper lip showed in-drawn and dry, and tightened as though it were
glued to his teeth.
"John, you _aren't_ going to faint or be sick or anything?"
"I'm all right."
He went forward, clenching his fists; moving in a curious drawn way, like
a sleep walker.
They were kneeling in the dust now, looking for the wounds.
"We must do this chap with the arm first. He'll want a tourniquet."
He spoke in a husky whisper as if he were half asleep....
The wounded head stuck to the floor. They scraped round it, digging with
their hands; it came up wearing a crust of powdered lime. A pad and a
bandage. They couldn't do anything more for that ... The third man, with
the fractured shin-bone and the big flesh-wound in his thigh, must have
splints and a dressing.
She wondered how John would set about his work. But his queer, hypnotised
actions were effectual and clean.
Between them they had fixed the tourniquet.
Through all her preoccupation and the quick, dexterous movement of her
hands she could feel her pity tightening her throat: pity that hurt like
love, that was delicious and exquisite like love. Nothing mattered,
nothing existed in her mind but the three wounded men. John didn't
matter. John didn't exist. He was nothing but a pair of hands working
quickly and dexterously with her own.... She looked up. John's mouth kept
its hard, glued look; his eyes were feverish behind a glaze of water, and
red-rimmed.
She thought: It's awful for him. He minds too much. It hurt her to see
how he minded. After all, he did matter. Deep inside her he mattered more
than the wounded men; he mattered more than anything on earth. Only there
wasn't time, there wasn't _time_ to think of him.
She turned to the next man and caught sight of the two machine guns with
their tilted muzzles standing in the corner of the room by the chimney.
They must remember to bring away the guns.
John's hypnotic whisper came again. "You might get those splints,
Charlotte."
As she crossed the road a shell fell in the open field beyond, and burst,
throwing up a great splash and spray of brown earth. She stiffened
herself in an abrupt gesture of defiance. Her mind retorted: "You've
missed, that time. You needn't think I'm going to put myself out for
_you_." To show that she wasn't putting herself out (in case they should
be looking) she strolled with dignity to her car, selected carefully the
kind of splint she needed, and returned. She thought: Oh well--supposing
they _do_ hit. We must get those men out before another comes.
John looked up as she came to him. His face glistened with pinheads of
sweat; he panted in the choking air.
"Where did that shell burst?"
"Miles away."
"Are you certain?"
"Rather."
She lied. Why not? John had been lying all the time. Lying was part of
their defiance, a denial that the enemy's effort had succeeded. Nothing
mattered but the fixing of the splints and the carrying of the men....
John was cranking up the engine when she turned back into the house.
"I _say_, what are you doing?"
"Going for the guns."
There was, she noticed, a certain longish interval between shells. John
and the wounded men would be safe from shrapnel under the shelter of the
wall. She brought out the first gun and stowed it at the back of the car.
Then she went in for the other. It stood on the seat between them with
its muzzle pointing down the road. Charlotte put her arm round it to
steady it.
On the way back to the dressing-station she sat silent, thinking of
the three wounded men in there, behind, rocked and shaken by the
jolting of the car on the uneven causeway. John was silent, too,
absorbed by his steering.
But as they ran into Ghent the romance of it, the romance of it, came
back to her. It wasn't over yet. They would have to go out again for the
wounded they had had to leave behind at Berlaere.
"John--John--It's like nothing else on earth."
"I told you it would be."
Slowly realization came to her. They had brought in their wounded under
the enemy's fire. And they had saved the guns.
* * * * *
"Do you mind," John said, "if Sutton goes instead of me He hasn't
been out yet?"
"N-no. Not if I can go too."
"Do you want to?"
"Awfully."
She had drawn up the ambulance in the Square before the Hospital and sat
in her driver's seat, waiting. Sutton came to her there. When he saw her
he stood still.
"_You_ going?"
"Rather. Do you mind?"
Sutton didn't answer. All the way out to Berlaere he sat stolid and
silent, not looking at anything they passed and taking no more notice of
the firing than if he hadn't heard it. As the car swung into Berlaere she
was aware of his voice, low under the noise of the engine.
"What did you say?"
"Conway told me it was you who saved the guns."
Suddenly she was humbled.
"It was the men who saved them. We just brought them away."
"Conway told me what you did," he said quietly.
Going out with Sutton was a quiet affair.
"You know," he said presently, "it was against the Hague Convention."
"Good heavens, so it was! I never thought of it."
"You must think of it. You gave the Germans the right to fire on all our
ambulances.... You see, this isn't just a romantic adventure; it's a
disagreeable, necessary, rather dangerous job."
"I didn't do it for swank. I knew the guns were wanted, and I couldn't
bear to leave them."
"I know, it would have been splendid if you'd been a combatant. But," he
said sadly, "this is a field ambulance, not an armoured car."