What had begun as an adventure deepened to a grim fight against blood-poisoning and long-continuing exposure and hunger. Hilda learned to drop the antiseptic into open wounds, to apply the pad, and roll the cotton. She learned to cut away the heavy army blue cloth to reach the spurting artery. She built the fire that heated the soup. She distributed the clean warm socks. Doubtless someone else could have done the work more skilfully, but the someone else was across the water in a comfortable country house, or watching the Russian dancers at the Coliseum. The leader of the Corps, Dr. McDonnell, was an absurdly brave little man. His heart may not have been in the Highlands, but his mind certainly was, for he led his staff into shell fire, week-days and Sundays, and all with a fine unconsciousness that anything unusual was singing and breaking around the path of their performance. He carried a pocket edition of the Oxford Book of Verse, and in the lulls of slaughter turned to the Wordsworth sonnets with a fine relish. "Something is going to happen. I can feel it coming," said Mrs. Bracher after one of these excursions into the troubled regions. "Yes," agreed Hilda, "they are long chances we are taking, but we are fools for luck." A famous war correspondent paid them a fleeting visit, before he was ordered twenty miles back to Dunkirk by Kitchener. "By the law of probabilities," he observed to Dr. McDonnell, as he was saying good-bye, "you and your staff are going to be wiped out, if you keep on running your motors into excitement." The Doctor smiled. It was doubtful if he heard the man. One day, the Doctor got hold of Smith, a London boy driver, and Hilda, and said: "I think we would better visit Dixmude, this morning. It sounds like guns in that direction. That means work for us. Get your hat, my dear." "But I never wear a hat," she said with a touch of irritation. "Ah, I hadn't noticed," returned the Doctor, and he hadn't. Hilda went free and fair those days, with uncovered head. Where the men went, there went she. For the modern woman has put aside fear along with the other impediments. The Doctor and Hilda, and, lastly, Smith, climbed aboard and started at fair speed. Smith's motor-ambulance was a swift machine, canopied by a brown hood, the color of a Mediterranean sail, with red crosses on the sides to ward off shells, and a huge red cross on the top to claim immunity from aeroplanes with bombs and plumbed arrows. "Make haste, make haste," urged Dr. McDonnell, who felt all time was wasted that was not spent where the air was thick. They had ridden for a half hour. "There are limits, sir," replied Smith. "If you will look at that piece of road ahead, sir, you will see that it's been chewed up with Jack Johnsons. It's hard on the machine."