They had just come up from Ostend, and they had not been ten minutes in Ghent before orders came through for an ambulance to be sent at once to Melle.
The only available member of the Corps was its Secretary and Reporter. To that utterly untrained and supremely inappropriate person Heaven sent this incredible luck.
When I think how easily I might have missed it! If I'd gone for a stroll in the town. If I'd sat five minutes longer with Mr. Foster. If the landlord of the Hôtel Cecil had kept his word and given me a table, when I should, to a dead certainty, have been writing this wretched Journal at the ineffable moment when the chauffeurs arrived.
I am glad to think that I had just enough morality left to play fair with Mrs. Lambert. I did try to find her, so that she shouldn't miss it. Somebody said she was in one of the restaurants on the Place with her husband. I looked in all the restaurants and she wasn't in one of them. The finger of Heaven pointed unmistakably to the Secretary and Reporter.
There was a delay of ten minutes, no more, while I got some cake and sandwiches for the hungry chauffeurs and took them to the bureau to have their brassards stamped. And in every minute of the ten I suffered tortures while we waited. I thought something must happen to prevent my taking that ambulance car out. I thought my heart would leave off beating and I should die before we started (I believe people feel like this sometimes before their wedding night). I thought the Commandant would come back and send out Ursula Dearmer instead. I thought the Military Power would come down from its secret hiding-place and stop me. But none of these things happened. At the last moment, I thought that M. C——
M. C—— was the Belgian Red Cross guide who took us into Antwerp. To M. C—— I said simply and firmly that I was going. The functions of the Secretary and Reporter had never been very clearly defined, and this was certainly not the moment to define them. M. C——, in his innocence, accepted me with confidence and a chivalrous gravity that left nothing to be desired.
The chauffeur Newlands (the leaner and darker one) declared himself ready for anything. All he wanted was to get to work. Poor Ascot, who was so like my friend the editor, had to be content with his vigil in the back yard.
At last we got off. I might have trusted Heaven. The getting off was a foregone conclusion, for we went along the south-east road, which had not worked its mysterious fascination for nothing.
At a fork where two roads go into Ghent we saw one of our old ambulance cars dashing into Ghent down the other road on our left. It was beyond hail. Heaven meant us to go on uninterrupted and unchallenged.
I had not allowed for trouble at the barrier. There always is a barrier, which may be anything from a mile to four miles from the field or village where the wounded are. Yesterday on the way to Lokeren the barrier was at Z——. To-day it was somewhere half-way between Ghent and Melle.