tottered and
fell. 'Pretty warm, ain't it?' was Tom's comment.

"Four days later he was waiting at Oudekappele with his car when he
heard that the Hospital of Saint-Jean at Dixmude was being shelled and
that the Belgian military man who had been sent with a motor-car to
carry off the wounded had been turned back by the fragment of a shell
that dropped in front of him. Tom thereupon drove into Dixmude to the
Hospital of Saint-Jean and removed from it two wounded soldiers and two
aged and paralysed civilians who had sheltered there, and brought them
to Furnes. The military ambulance men then followed his lead, and the
Hospital was emptied. That evening it was destroyed by a shell.

"And Bert--it was Bert who drove his ambulance into Kams-Kappele to the
barricade by the railway. It was Bert who searched in a shell-hole to
pick out three wounded from among thirteen dead; who with the help of a
Belgian priest, carried the three several yards to his car, under fire,
and who brought them in safety to Furnes."

And the others, the brave "Chaplain," and "Mr. Riley," and "Mr.
Lambert," have also proved themselves.

But when I think of the Corps it is chiefly of the four field-women that
I think--the two "women of Pervyse," and the other two who joined them
at their dangerous _poste_.

Both at Furnes and Pervyse they worked all night, looking after their
wounded; sometimes sleeping on straw in a room shared by the Belgian
troops, when there was no other shelter for them in the bombarded town.
One of them has driven a heavy ambulance car--in a pitch-black night,
along a road raked by shell-fire, and broken here and there into great
pits--to fetch a load of wounded, a performance that would have racked
the nerves of any male chauffeur ever born. She has driven the same car,
_alone_, with five German prisoners for her passengers. The four women
served at Pervyse (the town nearest to the firing-line) in "Mrs.
Torrence's" dressing-station--a cellar only twenty yards behind the
Belgian trenches. In that cellar, eight feet square and lighted and
ventilated only by a slit in the wall, two lived for three weeks,
sleeping on straw, eating what they could get, drinking water that had
passed through a cemetery where nine hundred Germans are buried. They
had to burn candles night and day. Here the wounded were brought as they
fell in the trenches, and were tended until the ambulance came to take
them to the base hospital at Furnes.

Da