"I'm not a warlike person," replied Hilda, "so I don't know what's the proper thing. But, just the same, I don't like to see them using black men. They don't know what they're fighting about. Anyway, I'd rather help them, than shoot them."
"It isn't their fault, is it, miss?" said Smith.
"By no means," returned Hilda; "they deserve all the more help because they are ignorant."
"That's right enough, too," agreed Smith and relapsed into his constitutional silence. He had a quiet way with him, which was particularly agreeable when the outer air was tense.
They rode on into Dixmude. The little city had been torn into shreds, as a sail is torn by a hurricane. But the ruined place was still treated from time to time with shell fire, lest any troops should make the charred wreckage a cover for advancing toward the enemy trenches. They rode on to where they caught a flash of soldiers' uniform.
In a blackened butt of an inn, a group of Senegalese were hiding. They were great six-foot fellows, with straight bodies, and shoulders for carrying weights—the face a black mask, expressionless, save for the rolling whites of the eyes, and the sudden startling grin of perfect white teeth, when trouble fell out of the sky. They had been left there to hold the furthest outpost. A dozen of them were hale and cheery. Two of them sat patiently in the straw, nursing each a damaged arm. Out in the gutter, fifty feet away, one sat picking at his left leg. Smith turned the car, half around, then backed it toward the ditch, then forward again, and so around, till at last he had it headed back along the road they had come. Then he brought it to a standstill, leaving the power on, so that the frame of the car shook, as the body of a hunting dog shakes before it is let loose from the leash.
There was a wail in the air overhead, a wail and then a roar, as a shell cut close over the hood of the ambulance and exploded in the low wall of the house opposite. Three more came more quickly than one could count aloud.
"Four; a battery of four," said Hilda.
The enemy artillery had sighted their ambulance, and believing it to contain reinforcements or ammunition, were leveling their destruction at it. The high car with its brown canvas covering was a fair mark in the clear morning light. Hilda motioned the two wounded men in the inn to come to the car. They slowly rose to their feet, and patiently trudged out into the road. Smith gave them a hand, and they climbed upon the footboard of the ambulance, and over into the interior. One of the black men called harshly to the man in the ditch down the road. He turned from his sitting posture, fell over on his face, and then came crawling on his hands and knees.
"Why doesn't he walk?" asked Hilda.