"Oh, hell, I'll go talk to 'em. You take the wheel." "No, sit still and don't get excited." "You're the one's getting excited." "Damn this gas." "My lieutenant, I beg you to move the horses to the side of the road. I have five very badly wounded men. They will die in this gas. I've got to get by." "God damn him, tell him to hurry." "Shut up, Tom, for God's sake." "They're moving. I can't see a thing in this mask." "Hah, that did for the two back horses." "Halt! Is there any room in the ambulance? One of my men's just got his thigh ripped up." "No room, no room." "He'll have to go to a poste de secours." The fresh air blowing hard in their faces and the woods getting greener on either side, full of ferns and small plants that half cover the strands of barbed wire and the rows of shells. At the end of the woods the sun rises golden into a cloudless sky, and on the grassy slope of the valley sheep and a herd of little donkeys are feeding, looking up with quietly moving jaws as the ambulance, smelling of blood and filthy sweat-soaked clothes, rattles by. * * * * * Black night. All through the woods along the road squatting mortars spit yellow flame. Constant throbbing of detonations. Martin, inside the ambulance, is holding together a broken stretcher, while the car jolts slowly along. It is pitch dark in the car, except when the glare of a gun from near the road gives him a momentary view of the man's head, a mass of bandages from the middle of which a little bit of blood-soaked beard sticks out, and of his lean body tossing on the stretcher with every jolt of the car. Martin is kneeling on the floor of the car, his knees bruised by the jolting, holding the man on the stretcher, with his chest pressed on the man's chest and one arm stretched down to keep the limp bandaged leg still. The man's breath comes with a bubbling sound, now and then mingling with an articulate groan. "Softly.... Oh, softly, oh--oh--oh!" "Slow as you can, Tom, old man," Martin calls out above the pandemonium of firing on both sides of the road, tightening the muscles of his arm in a desperate effort to keep the limp leg from bouncing. The smell of blood and filth is misery in his nostrils. "Softly.... Softly.... Oh--oh--oh!" The groan is barely heard amid the bubbling breath. Pitch dark in the car. Martin, his every muscle taut with the agony of the man's pain, is on his knees, pressing his chest on the man's chest, trying with an arm stretched along the man's leg to keep him from bouncing in the broken stretcher. "Needn't have troubled to have brought him," said the hospital orderly, as blood dripped fast from the stretcher, black in the light of the lantern. "He's pretty near dead now. He won't last long." CHAPTER VII "So you like it, Will? You like this sort of thing?"