"There are limits, sir," replied Smith. "If you will look at that piece of road ahead, sir, you will see that it's been chewed up with Jack Johnsons. It's hard on the machine."
But the Doctor's attention was already far away, for he had been seized with the beauty of the fresh spring morning. There was a tang in the air, and sense of awakening life in the ground, which not all the bleakness of the wasted farms and the dead bodies of cattle could obscure for him.
"Isn't that pretty," he observed, as a shrapnel exploded overhead in the blue with that ping with which it breaks its casing and releases the pattering bullets. It unfolded itself in a little white cloud, which hung motionless for an instant before the winds of the morning shredded it.
To Hilda the sensation of being under fire was always exhilarating. The thought of personal peril never entered her head. The verse of a favorite gypsy song often came into her memory these days:—
"I am breath, dew, all resources.
Laughing in your face, I cry
Would ye kill me, save your forces.
Why kill me, who cannot die."
They swept on to Oudekappele and its stout stone church, where lonely in the tower, the watcher, leaning earthward, told off his observations of the enemy to a soldier in the rafters, who passed them to another on the ladder, who dropped them to another on the stone floor, who hurried them to an officer at the telephone in the west front, who spoke them to a battery one mile away.
They took the poplar-lined drive-way that leads to the crossroads. They turned east, and made for Caeskerke. And now Smith let out his engine, for it is not wise to delay along a road that is in clear sight and range of active guns. At Caeskerke station, they halted for reports on the situation in Dixmude.
There, they saw their good friend, Dr. van der Helde, in the little group behind the wooden building of the station.
"I have just come from Dixmude," he said; "it is under a fairly heavy fire. The Hospital of St. Jean is up by the trenches. I have thirty poor old people there, who were left in the town when the bombardment started. They have been under shell fire for four days, and their nerves are gone. They are paralyzed with fright, and cannot walk. I brought them to the hospital from the cellars where they were hiding. I have come back here to try to get cars to take them to Furnes. Will you help me get them?"