As the motor ambulance at last drew up on the road opposite to where the barge was moored, there arose a sudden stir in the houses facing the mall. Windows were flung cautiously open, and dark forms leaned out of them.
Curtly instructing the priest to follow him, and requesting his orderlies to await his return, the Herr Doktor preceded the priest down the stone gangway, and on to the deck of the barge. In spite of the stars it was a very dark night, and suddenly he turned on the electric torch strapped to his breast. As he did so his companion uttered a sharp exclamation of surprise. Monsieur le Curé had never seen, he had never even heard of such an invention! It made him realise, as he had not yet done, what terrible, ingenious, irresistible fellows these Germans were.
The big trap-door in the deck had been opened, and the crane for lowering the wounded man was already in position. Mademoiselle Rouannès had been true to her word, everything had been made ready for the new patient, and the Herr Doktor felt suddenly very glad that he had followed his kindly so-truly-German-and-humane impulse about the priest.
Carefully the two went down the stairs now open to the star-powdered sky, and then the one in command knocked at the door of what he already called in his own mind 'Her ward.'
There followed a moment or two of delay—long enough for the Herr Doktor to become rather impatient. Then, slowly, the door opened, and the electric torch flashed for a moment over Mademoiselle Rouannès' head and breast. She no longer wore the Red Cross cap and veil, and her fair hair formed an aureole above her delicately-tinted face and deep blue eyes. 'If you will ask Jacob, he will tell you everything, Monsieur le Médecin. I have told him to put himself entirely at your disposal. I cannot come just now, for I must not leave my wounded. Two of them are even now dying.'
She spoke in a quick whisper and in her own language. But the Herr Doktor answered in English. 'Gracious miss, I have to you the priest brought,' he said eagerly.
'I thank you—oh! how I thank you!' There was a thrill of real, heartfelt gratitude in her voice—and something in the Herr Doktor's heart thrilled in answer, as she opened wide the narrow door to let them both come through.
Most of the men, lying stretched out there, on those narrow pallet beds, were asleep, but only the two now so near to death seemed really at peace. The others moved uneasily, and from their bloodless lips there issued painful mutterings and groans. One very young soldier kept counting over and over again—from one to thirty-seven. When he came to trente-sept, he always broke off, and began again. In answer to a mute, questioning glance from the Herr Doktor, the Red Cross nurse whispered, 'The thirty-eighth shot struck him. But he only counts like that when he is asleep.' A lad in the farthest corner, the third man in the danger zone, asked again and again, with a terrible, monotonous reiteration, 'Mais pourquoi? Pourquoi suis-je ici?'
Again the doctor turned questioningly to Jeanne Rouannès. 'He also always begins asking that question as soon as he falls asleep,' she said sighing; 'when awake he seems quite happy.'
The Herr Doktor was strangely reluctant to leave the mournful scene. He felt an uneasy curiosity as to what was going to take place. Even now the Red Cross nurse was turning a little table, which had been covered with various odd French medicaments, into an altar. But his duty to his own patient called him insistently away, and slowly he backed towards the door. Once there, however, he called out, but in a low voice, 'Miss? Miss? A word with you.'