It was bitter cold. We threw our blankets around us, serape fashion, and trudged down past the fury of the repair gang as they hammered at it under the leaping flares—past the five armed men slouching around their fire on the frontier of the dark.
"Are you off to the battle, compañeros?" cried one of the gang. "Look out for the bullets!" At that they all laughed. The sentries cried, "Adios! Don't kill them all! Leave a few pelones for us!"
Beyond the last torch, where the torn track was wrenched and tumbled about on the uprooted roadbed, a shadowy figure waited for us.
"Vamonos together," he said, peering at us. "In the dark three are an army." We stumbled along over the broken track, silently, just able to make him out with our eyes. He was a little dumpy soldier with a rifle and a half-empty cartridge-belt over his breast. He said that he had just brought a wounded man from the front to the hospital train and was on his way back.
"Feel this," he said, holding out his arm. It was drenched. We could see nothing.
"Blood," he continued unemotionally. "His blood. He was my compadre in the Brigada Gonzales-Ortega. We went in this night down there and so many, so many—— We were cut in half."
It was the first we had heard, or thought, of wounded men. All of a sudden we heard the battle. It had been going on steadily all the time, but we had forgotten—the sound was so monstrous, so monotonous. Far rifle fire came like the ripping of strong canvas, the cannon shocked like pile-drivers. We were only six miles away now.
Out of the darkness loomed a little knot of men—four of them—carrying something heavy and inert in a blanket slung between. Our guide threw up his rifle and challenged, and his answer was a retching groan from the blanket.
"Oiga compadre," lisped one of the bearers huskily. "Where, for the love of the Virgin, is the hospital train?"
"About a league——"