The dying man was still alive when he was lifted out of the ambulance.
He died that evening.
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The Commandant is pleased with his new ambulances. He is not altogether displeased with me.
We must have been very quick. For it was the Commandant's car that we passed at the fork of the road. And either he arrived a few minutes after we got back or we arrived just as he had got in. Anyhow, we met in the porch.
He and Ursula Dearmer and I went back to Melle again at once, in the new car. It was nearly dark when we got there.
We found Mrs. Torrence and little Janet in the village. They and Dr. Wilson had been working all day long picking up wounded off the field outside it. The German lines are not far off—at the bottom of the field. I think only a small number of their guns could rake the main street of the village where we were. Their shell went over our heads and over the roofs of the houses towards the French batteries on this side of the village. There must have been a rush from the German lines across this field, and the French batteries have done their work well, for Mrs. Torrence said the German dead are lying thick there among the turnips. She and Janet and Dr. Wilson had been under fire for eight hours on end, lifting men and carrying stretchers. I don't know whether their figures (the two girls in khaki tunics and breeches) could be seen from the German lines, but they just trudged on between the furrows, and over the turnip-tops, serenely regardless of the enemy, carefully sorting the wounded from the dead, with the bullets whizzing past their noses.
Of bullets Mrs. Torrence said, indeed, that eight hours of them were rather more than she cared for; and of carrying stretchers over a turnip-field, that it was as much as she and Janet could do. But they came back from it without turning a hair. I have seen women more dishevelled after tramping a turnip-field in a day's partridge-shooting.
They went off somewhere to find Dr. Wilson; and we—Ursula Dearmer, the Commandant and I—hung about the village waiting for the wounded to be brought in. The village was crowded with French and Belgian troops when we came into it. Then they gathered together and went on towards the field, and we followed them up the street. They called to us to stay under cover, or, if we must walk up the street, to keep close under the houses, as the bullets might come flying at us any minute.
No bullets came, however. It was like Baerlaere—it was like Lokeren—it was like every place I've been in, so far. Nothing came as long as there was a chance of its getting me.