an erratic course down the street like drunken men, and
presently I saw them staggering back again with their wounded
comrades, who had their arms about the necks of their rescuers. I
went out to aid them, but did not like the psychology of this street,
where death was teasing the footsteps of men, yapping at their heels.

I helped to pack up one of the ambulances and went back to Furnes
sitting next to the driver, but twisted round so that I could hold one of
the stretcher poles which wanted to jolt out of its strap so that the
man lying with a dead weight on the canvas would come down with a
smash upon the body of the man beneath.

"Ca y est," said my driver friend, very cheerfully. He was a gentleman
volunteer with his own ambulance and looked like a seafaring man in
his round yachting cap and blue jersey. He did not speak much
French, I fancy, but I loved to hear him say that "Ca y est," when he
raised a stretcher in his hefty arms and packed a piece of bleeding
flesh into the top of his car with infinite care lest he should give a jolt
to broken bones.

One of the men behind us had his leg smashed in two places. As we
went over roads with great stones and the rubbish of ruined houses
he cried out again and again in a voice of anguish:

"Pas si vite! Pour l'amour de Dieu... Pas si vite!"

Not so quickly. But when we came out of the burnt streets towards
the level crossing of the railway it seemed best to go quickly. Shells
were falling in the fields quite close to us. One of them dug a deep
hole in the road twenty yards ahead of us. Another burst close
behind. Instinctively I yearned for speed. I wanted to rush along that
road and get beyond the range of fire. But the driver in the blue
jersey, hearing that awful cry behind him, slowed down and crawled
along.

"Poor devil," he said. "I can imagine what it feels like when two bits of
broken bone get rubbing together. Every jolt and jar must give him
hell."

He went slower still, at a funeral pace, and looking back into the
ambulance said "Ca y est, mon vieux... Bon courage!"

Afterwards, this very gallant gentleman was wounded himself, and lay
in one of the ambulances which he had often led towards adventure,
with a jagged piece of steel in his leg, and two bones rasping together
at every jolt. But when he was lifted up, he stifled a groan and gave
his old cheerful cry of "Ca y est!"

11

During the two days that followed the convent at Furnes was
o