Somebody tried to grab our one stretcher. The two bearers seemed inclined to give it up. Nobody knew where our badly wounded man was. Nobody seemed very eager now to go and look for him. We three were surrounded and ordered to give up our stretcher. No use wasting time in hunting for one man, with the Germans on our backs. None of the men we were helping out of the train were seriously hurt. I had to choose between my one badly wounded man, whom we hadn't found, and about a dozen who could stumble somehow into safety. But my two stretcher-bearers were wavering badly, and it was all I could do to keep them firmly to their job. Then three women came out of a little house half hidden by the plantation. They spoke low, for fear the Germans should overhear them. "He is here," they said; "he is here." The stretcher-bearers hurried off with their stretcher. The train unloaded itself somehow. The man, horribly hurt, with a wound like a red pit below his shoulder-blades, was brought out and laid on the stretcher. He lay there, quietly, on his side, in a posture of utter resignation to anguish. He was a Flamand, clumsily built; he had a broad, rather ugly face, narrowing suddenly as the fringe of his whiskers became a little straggling beard. But to me he was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And I loved him. I do not think it is possible to love, to adore any creature more than I loved and adored that clumsy, ugly Flamand. He was my first wounded man. For I tried, I still try, to persuade myself that if I hadn't bullied my two bearers and repulsed the attack on my stretcher, he would have been left behind in the little house in the plantation. We got him out of the plantation all right and on to the paved road. Ursula Dearmer at Termonde with her Belgian officer, and at Zele with all her wounded, couldn't have been happier than I was with my one Flamand. We got him a few yards down the road all right. Then, to my horror, the bearers dumped him down on the paving-stones. They said he was much too heavy. They couldn't possibly carry him any more unless they rested. I didn't think it was exactly the moment for resting, and I told them so. The Germans hadn't come round the turn, and probably never would come; still, you never know; and the general impression seemed to be that they were about due. But the bearers stood stolidly in the middle of the road and mopped their faces and puffed. The situation began to feel as absurd and as terrible as a nightmare. So I grabbed one end of the stretcher and said I'd carry it myself. I said I wasn't very strong, and perhaps I couldn't carry it, but anyhow I'd try. They picked it up at once then, and went off at a good swinging trot over the paving-stones that jolted my poor Flamand most horribly. I told them to go on the smooth track at the side. They hailed this suggestion as a most brilliant and original idea.