kipped aside before the advancing car. "You can go," he
said, "to the dressing-station."

"They always do that as a matter of form--sort of warning us that it's
our own risk. They won't be responsible."

She didn't answer. She was thinking that when they turned John's driving
place would be towards the German guns.

"I wish you'd let me drive. You know I like driving."

"Not this time."

At the dressing-station, a deserted store, they found a Belgian Army
Medical officer engaged with a tired and flushed and dirty soldier. He
was bandaging his left hand which had made a trail of blood splashes from
the street to the counter. The right hand hung straight down from a nick
in the dropped wrist where a tendon had been severed. He told them that
they had grasped the situation. Seven men waited there for transport.

The best thing--perhaps--He looked doubtfully at Charlotte--would be for
them to take these men back at once. (The tired soldier murmured
something: a protest or an entreaty.) Though they were not exactly urgent
cases. They could wait.

Charlotte suspected a serious reservation. "You mean you have others
more urgent?"

The soldier got in his word. "Much more." His lips and eyes moved
excitedly in the flush and grime.

"Well yes," the doctor admitted that they had. Not in the village, but in
a hamlet about a mile outside of it. An outpost. This man and three
others had been holding it with two machine guns. He had had a finger
shot away and his wrist cut open by a shell-burst; the other three were
left there, badly wounded.

"All right, we'll go and fetch them."

"Monsieur, the place is being shelled. You have no orders."

"We've no orders not to."

The doctor spread out helpless palms, palms that disclaimed
responsibility.

"If you go, you go at your own risk. I will not send you."

"That's all right."

"Oh well--But certainly Mademoiselle must be left behind."

"Mademoiselle is much too useful."

Frantic gestures of eyebrows and palms.

"You must not stay there more than three minutes. _Three minutes_."

He turned to the cut tendon with an air of integrity, his conscience
appeased by laying down this time limit.

John released the clutch, and the soldier shouted out something, they
couldn't make out what, that ended with "mitrailleuses."

As they ran down the street the solemn Boom--Boom came right and left;
they were now straight between the two batteries.

"Are you all right, Sharli