The driver considered. He knew we were ten miles from the closest doctor. Then he addressed himself to the other three stretcher-cases—the men with the torture-torn legs.
"If I go fast, you guys are going to suffer the agonies of hell," he said, "and if I go slow this guy with the hemorrhage will croak before we get there. How do you want me to drive?"
There was not a minute's silence. The three broken leg cases responded almost in unison.
"Go as fast as you can," they said.
And we did. With Hartzell riding the running board beside me and the crater finder clinging to the mud guards on the other side, we sped through the darkness regardless of the ruts and shell holes. The jolting was severe but never once did there come another complaint from the occupants of the ambulance.
In this manner did we arrive in time at the first medical clearing station. I learned later that the life of the man with the hemorrhage was saved and he is alive to-day.
The clearing station was located in an old church on the outskirts of a little village. Four times during this war the flow and ebb of battle had passed about this old edifice. Hartzell half carried me off the ambulance seat and into the church. As I felt my feet scrape on the flagstoned flooring underneath the Gothic entrance arch, I opened my right eye for a painful survey of the interior.
The walls, grey with age, appeared yellow in the light of the candles and lanterns that were used for illumination. Blankets, and bits of canvas and carpet had been tacked over the apertures where once stained glass windows and huge oaken doors had been. These precautions were necessary to prevent the lights from shining outside the building and betraying our location to the hospital-loving eyes of German bombing 'planes whose motors we could hear even at that minute, humming in the black sky above us.
Our American wounded were lying on stretchers all over the floor. Near the door, where I entered, a number of pews had been pushed to one side and on these our walking wounded were seated. They were smoking cigarettes and talking and passing observations on every fresh case that came through the door. They all seemed to be looking at me.
My appearance must have been sufficient to have shocked them. I was hatless and my hair was matted with blood. The red-stained bandage around my forehead and extending down over my left cheek did not hide the rest of my face, which was unwashed, and consequently red with fresh blood.