They told me that the village had been fired on by shrapnel a few minutes before we came into it. They said we were only a hundred [?] yards from the German trenches. We could see the edge of the field from the village street. The trenches [?] were at the bottom of it.
It was Baerlaere all over again. The firing stopped as soon as I came within range of it, and didn't begin again until we had got away.
You couldn't take any interest in the firing or the German trenches, or the eager little Englishman, or anything. You couldn't see anything but those five wounded men, or think of anything but how to get them into the ambulance as painlessly and in as short a time as possible.
The man on the dripping stretcher was mortally wounded. He was lifted in first, very slowly and gently.
The Curé climbed in after him, carrying the Host.
He kneeled there while the blood from the wounded head oozed through the bandages and through the canvas of the stretcher to the floor and to the skirts of his cassock.
We waited.
There was no ugly haste in the Supreme Act; the three mortal moments that it lasted (it could not have lasted more) were charged with immortality, while the Curé remained kneeling in the pool of blood.
I shall never become a Catholic. But if I do, it will be because of the Curé of Melle, who turned our new motor ambulance into a sanctuary after the French soldier had baptized it with his blood. I have never seen, I never shall see, anything more beautiful, more gracious than the Soul that appeared in his lean, dark face and in the straight, slender body under the black soutane. In his simple, inevitable gestures you saw adoration of God, contempt for death, and uttermost compassion.
It was all over. I received his missal and his bag of purple silk as he gathered his cassock about him and came down.