d. A few yards ahead a small,
empty wine-shop faced the open field; its doorstep and the path in front
of its windows glittered with glass dust, with spikes and splinters, and
heaped shale of glass that slid and cracked under your feet. Beyond it,
a house with its door and all its windows and the front slope of its
roof blown in. A broken shutter sagged from the wall. Then the shell of
the last house; it pricked up one plastered gable, white and hard
against the blue.

They found the men in the last house but one, the house with the broken
shutter. They went, carrying their stretchers and the haversack of
dressings, under the slanted lintel into the room. The air in there was
hot and stifling and thickened with a grey powdery swarm. Their feet sank
through a layer of pinkish, greyish dust.

The three wounded men lay stretched out on this floor, among brickbats
and broken panes and slabs of dropped plaster. A thin grey powder had
settled on them all. And by the side of each man the dust was stiffened
into a red cake with a glairy pool in the middle of it, fed from the raw
wound; and where two men lay together their pools had joined and
overflowed in a thin red stream.

John put down his stretcher and stood still. His face was very white, and
his upper lip showed in-drawn and dry, and tightened as though it were
glued to his teeth.

"John, you _aren't_ going to faint or be sick or anything?"

"I'm all right."

He went forward, clenching his fists; moving in a curious drawn way, like
a sleep walker.

They were kneeling in the dust now, looking for the wounds.

"We must do this chap with the arm first. He'll want a tourniquet."

He spoke in a husky whisper as if he were half asleep....

The wounded head stuck to the floor. They scraped round it, digging with
their hands; it came up wearing a crust of powdered lime. A pad and a
bandage. They couldn't do anything more for that ... The third man, with
the fractured shin-bone and the big flesh-wound in his thigh, must have
splints and a dressing.

She wondered how John would set about his work. But his queer, hypnotised
actions were effectual and clean.

Between them they had fixed the tourniquet.

Through all her preoccupation and the quick, dexterous movement of her
hands she could feel her pity tightening her throat: pity that hurt like
love, that was delicious and exquisite like love. Nothing mattered,
nothing existed in her mind but the three wounded men. J