“I hope not,” she replied with kindly tolerance. “But if he is it will be supposed that a bomb did it.”
As a matter of fact the Herald next morning reported the miraculous escape of an American found on the very edge of a shell hole, recovering, but showing one of the curious results of shell shock, being convinced that two women had stolen a car from his garage, and had run it into the hole in a deliberate attempt to kill him.
Aggie read this to us at breakfast, and Tish merely observed that it was very sad, and that she proposed studying shell shock at the Front. Not until months later did we tell Aggie the story of that night.
That morning Tish disappeared, and at noon she came back to say that she had at last secured the ambulance, and that we would start for the Front at once. Privately she told me that in a pocket of the car she had found permits to get us out of Paris, but that the car would be missed before long, and that we would better start at once.
It is strange to look back and recall with what blitheness we prepared to leave. And it is interesting, too, to remember the conversation with Mr. Burton when he called that afternoon.
“Hello!” he said, glancing about. “This looks like moving on. Where to, oh, brave and radiant spirits?”
“We haven’t quite decided,” Tish said. She was cleaning her revolver at the time.
“You haven’t decided! Great Scott, haven’t you any orders? Or any permits?”
“All that are necessary,” Tish said, squinting into the barrel of her revolver. “Aggie, don’t forget your hay fever spray.”
“But look here,” he began, “you know this is France in wartime. I hate to throw a wrench into the machinery, but no one can travel a mile in this country without having about a million papers. You’ll be arrested; you’ll be——”