"What did you come for?" I whispered furiously. "What did you think
war was?... Well, good-bye, do as you please!"

As I drew away I saw a look of desperate determination in his eyes. He
looked at me like a dog who expects to be beaten. Then what must have
been one of the supreme moments of his life came to him. I saw him
struggle to command, with the effort of his whole soul, his terror.
For a moment he wavered. He made a hopeless gesture with his hand,
took two little steps as though he would run into the hedge amongst
the soldiers and hide there, then suddenly walked past me, quickly,
towards the wagons, with his own absurd little strut, with his head
up, giving his cough, looking, after that, neither to the right, nor
to the left.

In silence we caught up the wagons. Soon, at some cross-roads, they
came to a pause. The guide was waiting for me. "It would be better,
your Honour," he whispered, "for the wagons to stay here. We shall go
now simply with the stretchers...."

We left the wagons and, some fifteen of us, turned off down a lane to
the left. Sometimes there were soldiers in the hedges, sometimes they
met us, slipping from shadow to shadow. Always we asked whether they
knew of any wounded. We found a wounded soldier groaning under the
hedge. One leg was soaked in blood and he gave little shrill desperate
cries as we lifted him on to the stretcher. Another soldier, lying on
the road in the moonlight, murmured incessantly: "_Boje moi! Boje moi!
Boje moi!_" But they were all ghosts. We alone, in that familiar and
yet so unreal world, were alive. When a stretcher was filled, four
sanitars turned back with it to the wagons, and we were soon a very
small party. We arrived at a church--a large fantastic white church
with a green turret that I had seen from the opposite hill in the
morning. Then it had seemed small and very remote. I had been told
that much firing had been centring round it, and it seemed now for me
very strange that we should be standing under its very shadow, its
outline so quiet and grave under the moon, with its churchyard, a
little orchard behind it, and a garden, scenting the night air, close
at hand. Here in the graveyard there was a group of wounded soldiers,
in their eyes that look of faithful expectation of certain relief. Our
stretchers were soon full.

We were about to turn back when suddenly the road behind us was filled
with shadows. As we came out of the churchyard an officer st