for God's sake; we've got to get past."

"I'm doing the best I can, Tom."

"Well, make 'em look lively. Damn this gas!"

"Put your masks on again; you can't breathe without them in this
hollow."

"Hay! ye God-damn sons of bitches, get out of the way."

"But they can't."

"Oh, hell, I'll go talk to 'em. You take the wheel."

"No, sit still and don't get excited."

"You're the one's getting excited."

"Damn this gas."

"My lieutenant, I beg you to move the horses to the side of the road. I
have five very badly wounded men. They will die in this gas. I've got to
get by."

"God damn him, tell him to hurry."

"Shut up, Tom, for God's sake."

"They're moving. I can't see a thing in this mask."

"Hah, that did for the two back horses."

"Halt! Is there any room in the ambulance? One of my men's just got his
thigh ripped up."

"No room, no room."

"He'll have to go to a poste de secours."

The fresh air blowing hard in their faces and the woods getting greener
on either side, full of ferns and small plants that half cover the
strands of barbed wire and the rows of shells.

At the end of the woods the sun rises golden into a cloudless sky, and
on the grassy slope of the valley sheep and a herd of little donkeys are
feeding, looking up with quietly moving jaws as the ambulance, smelling
of blood and filthy sweat-soaked clothes, rattles by.

* * * * *

Black night. All through the woods along the road squatting mortars spit
yellow flame. Constant throbbing of detonations.

Martin, inside the ambulance, is holding together a broken stretcher,
while the car jolts slowly along. It is pitch dark in the car, except
when the glare of a gun from near the road gives him a momentary view of
the man's head, a mass of bandages from the middle of which a little bit
of blood-soaked beard sticks out, and of his lean body tossing on the
stretcher with every jolt of the car. Martin is kneeling on the floor of
the car, his knees bruised by the jolting, holding the man on the
stretcher, with his chest pressed on the man's chest and one arm
stretched down to keep the limp bandaged leg still.

The man's breath comes with a bubbling sound, now and then mingling with
an articulate groan.

"Softly.... Oh, softly, oh--oh--oh!"

"Slow as you can, Tom, old man," Martin calls out above the pandemonium
of firing on both sides of the road, tightening the muscles of his arm
in a desperate effort