"The padre has been killed, sir," said the doctor simply. "Aurelle is hit, too, but I don't think it is serious. No, it's his shoulder—nothing much."
The colonel groaned sympathetically.
Parker helped O'Grady to lay the Frenchman on a table; a crumpled piece of paper attracted the colonel's attention; he picked it up and read with difficulty:
"Pourquoi me fermes-tu les yeux
Lorsque tu me baises la bouche?"
"What is it all about?" he said.
"It belongs to Aurelle," said the doctor.
The colonel carefully folded the little sheet of paper and slid it respectfully into the young Frenchman's pocket. Then, after the doctor had finished dressing the wound and had sent for an ambulance, they laid the padre on Madame's humble bed. They all took their hats off and stood silent for some time contemplating the strangely softened features of the childlike old man.
The doctor looked at his watch; it was twenty minutes past nine.
CHAPTER XIX
Aurelle, on leaving hospital, was attached, while convalescent, to the English colonel, Musgrave, who commanded a supply depot at Estrées, a little village well behind the line. He missed the evenings with the Lennox Mess, but buying fodder and wood took him some way out into the pretty undulating country with its clear streams, and he loved Estrées, hiding its innumerable belfries among the flowery hills.