, to acquire some of that fantastic indifference to the chance of
death which enables the soldiers to stir their soup without an upward
glance at a skyful of jagged steel. Only now and then the old question
came to one, "This--or the next?"

It was only the adventure of searching out the wounded that broke
the monotony for the Belgian ambulance men. At first they were not
hard to find--they were crowded upon the straw in cottage parlours,
cleared of all but the cheap vases on the mantelshelf and family
photographs tacked upon walls that had not been built for the bloody
mess of tragedy which they now enclosed. On their bodies they bore
the signs of the tremendous accuracy of the enemy's artillery, and by
their number, increasing during the day, one could guess at the tragic
endurance of the Belgian infantry in the ring of iron which was closing
upon them; drawing just a little nearer by half a village or half a road
as the hours passed. The ambulances carried them away to the
station of Fortem, where those who could still sit up were packed into
a steam tram, and where the stretcher-cases were taken to the civil
hospital at Furnes by motor transport. But in outlying farmsteads in
the zone of fire, and in isolated cottages which had been struck by a
chance shot, were other wounded men difficult to get. It was work for
scouting cars, and too dangerous for ambulances.

Some volunteers made several journeys down the open roads to
places not exactly suitable for dalliance. Lieutenant de Broqueville
called upon me for this purpose several times because I had a fast
little car. I was glad of the honour, though when he pointed to a
distant roof where a wounded man was reported to be lying, it looked
to me a long, long way in the zone of fire. Two houses blown to
pieces by the side of a ditch showed that the enemy's shells were
dropping close, and it was a test of nerves to drive deliberately
through the flat fields with sharp, stabbing flashes on their frontiers,
and right into the middle of an infernal tumult of guns.

It was in the darkness that I went back to Furnes again, with the last
of the wounded--a French corporal, who groaned in anguish at every
jolt in the road, and then was silent with his head flopping sideways in
a way that frightened me. Several times I called back to him,
"Courage, mon vieux! ... Comment allez vous?" But he made no
answer and there were times when I thought I had a dead man
behind me. A bitin