se 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 h