With this he sent her away in an empty ambulance that was returning to a small village up near the battle front, and beyond. The growl and rattle of the big guns had been a disturbing factor to Belinda's hearing since soon after sunrise. The driver of the ambulance, however, said they were very distant. There was no fighting on the immediate front at present.
This ambulancier was nothing but a boy. He had finished his freshman course at Columbia and had insisted on coming over to serve France in the Red Cross. Like Belinda, he was "half French."
"Mom and the girls are in Paris. They're knitting socks and winding bandages for the Red Cross. Dad stays at home and makes dollars for us all. Poor dad! he has the hardest job—and serves France more perfectly than any of us!"
Belinda began to realize after listening to him that driving a cheaply built American ambulance behind the battleline was no sinecure.
"The British chaps call these motor-cars 'mechanical fleas.' But they do the work—and as a usual thing it takes a shell to really put 'em out of commission. We drivers learn how to repair them—even if we break down on the road. The British Johnnies can laugh; but France should strike that Detroit manufacturer a special medal-of-honor.
"I carry in my tool and repair kit almost everything but a new chassis," the boy added, laughing. "That's since I broke down once coming along from the front with two blessés on the stretchers. Seemed to me at the time the old girl busted in half a dozen places at once.
"I'd have made the hospital on three cylinders at that, only for a steep hill. Twice the old car all but got to the top only to die, coughing, and slide clear back to the bottom. My two blessés were pretty well shattered below their waists; but they were good sports. They were laying bets with each other as to whether I'd pull 'em over the hill before a Boche shell got 'em."
"But you did save them?" Belinda asked.
"One of 'em," said the boy soberly. "I had to walk twelve kilometres for help. While I was gone one of the wounded chaps died. He had taken the short end of the bet and he paid the other chap just before he went off. Good sports, those poilus, after all."
Belinda listened—and looked. Not many physical and visible signs of war along this road. It was a warm morning; the dust rose behind them in a stifling cloud, but ahead the driveway and the fields were clear. Why! there were neatly staked vineyards, blooming gardens, vegetable fields—all the signs of farm industry.