Nevertheless we hastened. The world, in spite of the ghosts, was real enough for us to be conscious of that attack looming behind us. We found our wagons, transferred our wounded, then hurried down the road. We found the cross-roads and there, waiting for us, Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna. Standing in the moonlight, commanding, as it seemed to me, all of us, even Semyonov, she was a very different figure from the frightened girl of the early morning. Now her life was in her eyes, her body inflamed with the fire of the things that had come to her. So young in experience was she, so ignorant of all earlier adventure, that she could well be seized, utterly and completely, by her new vision ... possessed by some vision she was. And that vision was not Trenchard. Seeing her, he hurried towards her, with a glad cry: "Ah, you are safe!" But she did not notice him. "Quick, this way!... Yes, the stretchers here.... No, I have everything.... At once. There is little time!" The wounded were laid on the stretchers in the square of the cross-roads. Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna bandaged them under the moonlight and with the aid of electric-torches. On every side of me there were little dialogues: "No ... not there. More this way. Yes, that bandage will do. It's fresh. Hold up his leg. No, _durak_, under the knee there.... Where's the lint?... Turn him a little--there--like that. _Horosho, golubchik_. _Seitchass_! No, turn it back over the thigh. Now, once more ... that's it. What's that--bullet or shrapnel?... Take it back again, over the shoulder.... Yes, twice!" Once I caught sight of Trenchard, hurrying to be useful with the little bottle of iodine, stumbling over one of the stretchers, causing the wounded man to cry out. Then Semyonov's voice angrily: "Tchort! Who's that?... Ah, Meester! of course!" Then Marie Ivanovna's voice: "I've finished this, Alexei Petrovitch.... That's all, isn't it?" These voices were all whispers, floating from one side of the road to the other. The wounded men were lifted back on to the wagons. We moved off again; Semyonov, Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna and I were now sitting together. We left the flat fields where we had been so busy. Very slowly we began to climb the hill down which I had come this afternoon. Behind me was a great fan of country, black now under a hidden moon, dead as though our retreat from it, depriving it of the last proofs of life, had flung it back into non-existence. Before us was the black forest. Not a sound save the roll of our wheels and, sometimes, a cry from one of the wounded soldiers, not a stir of wind....