So we went back to the village, where we found the infantry being drawn up in order and doing something to its rifles. For one thrilling moment I imagined that the Germans were about to leap out of their trenches and rush the village, and that the Belgians [? French] were preparing for a bayonet charge.
"In that case," I thought, "we shall be very useful in picking up the wounded and carrying them away in that car."
I never thought of the ugly rush and the horrors after it. It is extraordinary how your mind can put away from it any thought that would make life insupportable.
But no, they were not fixing bayonets. They were not doing anything to their rifles; they were only stacking them.
It was then that you thought of the ugly rush and were glad that, after all, it wouldn't happen.
You were glad—and yet in spite of that same gladness, there was a little sense of disappointment, unaccountable, unpardonable, and not quite sane.
One of the men showed us a burst shrapnel shell. We examined it with great interest as the kind of thing that would be most likely to hit us on our way from Baerlaere to Zele.
We had been barely half an hour hanging about Baerlaere, but it seemed as if we had wasted a whole afternoon there. At last we started. We were told to drive fast, as the fire might open on us at any minute. We drove very fast. Our road lay through open country flat to the river, with no sort of cover anywhere from the German fire, if it chose to come. About half a mile ahead of us was a small hamlet that had been shelled. Mr. L. told us to duck when we heard the guns. I remember thinking that I particularly didn't want to be wounded in my right arm, and that as I sat with my right arm resting on the ledge of the car it was somewhat exposed to the German batteries, so I wriggled low down in my seat and tucked my arm well under cover for quite five minutes. But you couldn't see anything that way, so I popped up again and presently forgot all about my valuable arm in the sheer excitement of the rush through the danger zone. Our car was low on the ground; still, it was high enough and big enough to serve as a mark for the German guns and it fairly gave them the range of the road.
But though the guns had been pounding away before we started, they ceased firing as we went through.
That, however, was sheer luck. And presently it was brought home to me that we were not the only persons involved in the risk of this joyous adventure. Just outside the bombarded hamlet ahead of us we were stopped by some Belgian [? French] soldiers hidden in the cover of a ditch by the roadside, which if it was not a trench might very easily have been one. They were talking in whispers for fear of being overheard by the Germans, who must have been at least a mile off, across the fields on the other side of the river. A mile seemed a pretty safe distance; but Mr. L. said it wouldn't help us much, considering that the range of their guns was twenty-four miles. The soldiers told us we couldn't possibly get through to Zele. That was true. The road was blocked—by the ruins of the hamlet—not twenty yards from where we were pulled up. We got out of the car; and while Mr. L. and the Belgian lady conversed with the soldiers, Mr. M. and I walked on to investigate the road.