"True enough," assented Hilda, "but it's a curious fact that the wounded can't retreat as fast as the other men, so I'm afraid we shall have to look them up. Of course, it would be a lot pleasanter if they could come to meet us half-way."
Smith let out his motor, and turned up his coat collar, a habit of his when he anticipated a breezy time. They pounded down the road, and into the choice old town.
They had chanced on the afternoon when the enemy's guns were reducing it from an inhabited place into a rubbish heap. They could not well have chosen a brisker hour for the promised visit. The shells were coming in three and four to the minute. There was a sound of falling masonry. The blur of red brick-dust in the air, and the fires from a half dozen blazing houses, filled the eyes with hot prickles. The street was a mess over which the motor veered and tossed like a careening boat in a heavy seawash. In the other car, their leader, brave, perky little Dr. McDonnell, sat with his blue eyes dreaming away at the ruin in front of him. The man was a mystic and burrowed down into his sub-consciousness when under fire. This made him calm, slow, and very absent-minded, during the moments when he passed in under the guns.
They steamed up to the big yellow Hôtel de Ville. This was the target of the concentrated artillery fire, for here troops had been sheltering. Here, too, in the cellar, was the dressing-station for the wounded. A small, spent, but accurately directed obus, came in a parabola from over behind the roofs, and floated by the ambulance and thudded against the yellow brick of the stately hall.
"Ah, it's got whiskers on it," shouted Hilda in glee. "I didn't know they got tired like that, and came so slow you could see them, did you, Mr. Barkleigh?"
"No, no, of course not," he muttered, "they don't. What's that?"
The clear, cold tinkle of breaking and spilling glass had seized his attention. The sound came out from the Hôtel de Ville.
"The window had a pane," said Hilda.
"The town is doomed," said Barkleigh.
"Can't we get out of this?" he insisted. "This is no place to be."