VIII
At the turn of the road they heard the guns: a solemn Boom—Boom coming up out of hushed spaces; they saw white puffs of smoke rising in the blue sky. The French guns somewhere back of them. The German guns in front southwards beyond the river.
Charlotte looked at John; he was brilliantly happy. They smiled at each other as if they said "Now it's beginning."
Outside the village of Berlaere they were held up by two sentries with rifles. (Thrilling, that.) Their Belgian guide leaned out and whispered the password; John showed their passports and they slipped through.
Where the road turned on their left into the street they saw a group of soldiers standing at the door of a house. Three of them, a Belgian lieutenant and two non-commissioned officers, advanced hurriedly and stopped the car. The lieutenant forbade them to go on.
"But," John said, "we've got orders to go on."
A shrug intimated that their orders were not the lieutenant's affair.
They couldn't go on.
"But we must go on. We've got to fetch some wounded."
"There aren't any wounded," said the lieutenant.
Charlotte had an inspiration. "You tell us that tale every time," she said, "and there are always wounded."
The Belgian guide and the lieutenant exchanged glances.
"I've told you there aren't any," the lieutenant said. "You must go back."
"Here—You explain."
But instead of explaining the little Belgian backed up the lieutenant by a refusal on his own part to go on.
"He can please himself. We're going on."
"You don't imagine," Charlotte said, "by any chance that we're afraid?"
The lieutenant smiled, a smile that lifted his ferocious, upturned moustache: first sign that he was yielding. He looked at the sergeant and the corporal, and they nodded.
John had his foot on the clutch. "We're due," he said, "at the dressing station by three o'clock."
She thought: He's magnificent. She could see that the lieutenant and the soldiers thought he was magnificent. Supposing she had gone out with some meek fool who would have gone back when they told him!
The lieutenant skipped 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, Sharlie?"
"Rather."
The little Belgian by her side muttered, protesting.
"We're not really in any danger. It's all going on over our heads."
"Do you suppose," she said, "they'll get our range?"
"Rather not. Why should they? They've got their range and they'll stick to it."
The firing on their right ceased.
"They're quiet enough now," she said.
The little Belgian informed her that if they were quiet so much the worse. They were finding their range.
She thought: We were safe enough before, but—
"Supposing," she said, "they alter their range?"
"They won't alter it just for the fun of killing us. They haven't spotted the batteries yet. It's the batteries they're trying for, not the street."
But the little Belgian went on protesting.
"What's the matter with him?"
"He's getting a bit jumpy," she said, "that's all."
"Tell him to buck up. Tell him it's all right."
She translated. The little Belgian shook his head, mournfully persistent.
"Monsieur," he said, "didn't know."
"Oh yes, he does know."
It was absurd of the little man to suppose you didn't know, when the noise of the French guns told them how near they were to the enemy's target.
She tried not to listen to him. His mutterings broke up the queer stillness that held her after she had heard the guns. It was only by keeping still that you felt, wave by wave, the rising thrill of the adventure. Only by keeping still she was aware of what was passing in John's mind. He knew. He knew. They were one in the almost palpable excitement that they shared; locked close, closer than their bodies could have joined them, in the strange and poignant ecstasy of danger.
There was the sound of an explosion somewhere in front of them beyond the houses.
"Did you hear that, Mademoiselle?"
"I did."
"Miles away," said John.
She knew it wasn't. She thought: He doesn't want me to know. He thinks
I'll be frightened. I mustn't tell him.
But the Belgian had none of John's scruples. The shell was near, he said; very near. It had fallen in the place they were going to.
"But that's the place where the wounded men are."
He admitted that it was the place where the wounded men were.
They were out of the village now. Their road ran through flat open country, a causeway raised a little above the level of the fields. No cover anywhere from the fire if it came. The Belgian had begun again.
"What's that he's saying now?"
"He says we shall give away the position of the road."
"It's the one they told us to take. We've got to go on it. He's in a beastly funk. That's what's the matter with him."
The Belgian shrugged his shoulders as much as to say he had done his duty and things might now take their course, and they were mistaken if for one minute they supposed he was afraid. But they had not gone fifty yards before he begged to be put down. He said it was absolutely necessary that he should go back to the village and collect the wounded there and have them ready for the ambulance on its return.
They let him go. Charlotte looked round the corner of the hood and saw him running with brief, jerky strides.
"He's got a nerve," said John, "to be able to do it."
"What excuse do you think he'll make?"
"Oh, he'll say we sent him."
The straight dyke of the road went on and on. Seen from the sunk German lines the heavy ambulance car would look like a house on wheels running along a wall. She thought again of John on his exposed seat. If only he had let her drive—But that was absurd. Of course he wouldn't let her. If you were to keep on thinking of the things that might happen to John—Meanwhile nothing could take from them the delight of this dangerous run across the open. She had to remind herself that the adventure, the romance of it was not what mattered most; it was not the real thing, the thing they had gone out for.
When they came to the wounded, when they came to the wounded, then it would begin.
The hamlet began to show now; it sat on one side of the road, low and alone in the flat land, an open field in front of it, and at the bottom of the field the river and a line of willows, and behind the willows the Germans, hidden. White smoke curled among the branches. You could see it was an outpost, one of the points at which the Germans, if they broke through, would come into the village. They supposed that the house where the wounded men were would be the last of the short row.
Here on their right there were no houses, only the long, high flank of a barn. The parts that had been built out into the field were shelled away, but the outer wall by the roadside still held. It was all that stood between them and the German guns. They drew up the car under its shelter and got down.
They could see all the houses of the hamlet at once on their left; whitewashed walls; slender grey doors and shutters. The three that looked out on to the barn were untouched. 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. John didn't matter. John didn't exist. He was nothing but a pair of hands working quickly and dexterously with her own…. She looked up. John's mouth kept its hard, glued look; his eyes were feverish behind a glaze of water, and red-rimmed.
She thought: It's awful for him. He minds too much. It hurt her to see how he minded. After all, he did matter. Deep inside her he mattered more than the wounded men; he mattered more than anything on earth. Only there wasn't time, there wasn't time to think of him.
She turned to the next man and caught sight of the two machine guns with their tilted muzzles standing in the corner of the room by the chimney. They must remember to bring away the guns.
John's hypnotic whisper came again. "You might get those splints,
Charlotte."
As she crossed the road a shell fell in the open field beyond, and burst, throwing up a great splash and spray of brown earth. She stiffened herself in an abrupt gesture of defiance. Her mind retorted: "You've missed, that time. You needn't think I'm going to put myself out for you." To show that she wasn't putting herself out (in case they should be looking) she strolled with dignity to her car, selected carefully the kind of splint she needed, and returned. She thought: Oh well—supposing they do hit. We must get those men out before another comes.
John looked up as she came to him. His face glistened with pinheads of sweat; he panted in the choking air.
"Where did that shell burst?"
"Miles away."
"Are you certain?"
"Rather."
She lied. Why not? John had been lying all the time. Lying was part of their defiance, a denial that the enemy's effort had succeeded. Nothing mattered but the fixing of the splints and the carrying of the men….
John was cranking up the engine when she turned back into the house.
"I say, what are you doing?"
"Going for the guns."
There was, she noticed, a certain longish interval between shells. John and the wounded men would be safe from shrapnel under the shelter of the wall. She brought out the first gun and stowed it at the back of the car. Then she went in for the other. It stood on the seat between them with its muzzle pointing down the road. Charlotte put her arm round it to steady it.
On the way back to the dressing-station she sat silent, thinking of the three wounded men in there, behind, rocked and shaken by the jolting of the car on the uneven causeway. John was silent, too, absorbed by his steering.
But as they ran into Ghent the romance of it, the romance of it, came back to her. It wasn't over yet. They would have to go out again for the wounded they had had to leave behind at Berlaere.
"John—John—It's like nothing else on earth."
"I told you it would be."
Slowly realization came to her. They had brought in their wounded under the enemy's fire. And they had saved the guns.
* * * * *
"Do you mind," John said, "if Sutton goes instead of me He hasn't been out yet?"
"N-no. Not if I can go too."
"Do you want to?"
"Awfully."
She had drawn up the ambulance in the Square before the Hospital and sat in her driver's seat, waiting. Sutton came to her there. When he saw her he stood still.
"You going?"
"Rather. Do you mind?"
Sutton didn't answer. All the way out to Berlaere he sat stolid and silent, not looking at anything they passed and taking no more notice of the firing than if he hadn't heard it. As the car swung into Berlaere she was aware of his voice, low under the noise of the engine.
"What did you say?"
"Conway told me it was you who saved the guns."
Suddenly she was humbled.
"It was the men who saved them. We just brought them away."
"Conway told me what you did," he said quietly.
Going out with Sutton was a quiet affair.
"You know," he said presently, "it was against the Hague Convention."
"Good heavens, so it was! I never thought of it."
"You must think of it. You gave the Germans the right to fire on all our ambulances…. You see, this isn't just a romantic adventure; it's a disagreeable, necessary, rather dangerous job."
"I didn't do it for swank. I knew the guns were wanted, and I couldn't bear to leave them."
"I know, it would have been splendid if you'd been a combatant. But," he said sadly, "this is a field ambulance, not an armoured car."