Part 19

The day wore along, with spurt after spurt to the front, and then the slower drive back, when Woffington guided the car patiently and skilfully, so that the wounded men inside should not be shaken by the motion. They had a snack of luncheon with them, and ate it while they rode. Their little barrel of water, swinging between the wheels, had long ago gone to fevered men.

"First ambulance I've seen in twenty-four hours," said Captain Davies, as he came on them out of the dusk of Hoogar wood. The stern and unbending organization of the military had found it necessary to hold a hundred or more ambulances of the Royal Army Medical Corps in readiness all day in the market place of Ypres against a sudden evacuation. So there were simply no cars, but their one car, to speed out to the front and gather the wounded.

It was strange, in the evening light, to work out along the road between lines of poplar trees. Dim forms kept passing them--two by two, each couple with a stretcher and its burden. An old farm cart came jogging by, wrenching its body from side to side as it struck invisible hummocks and dipped into shell holes. It was loaded with outstretched forms of men, whose wounds were torn at by the jerking of the cart. In companies, fresh men, talking in whispers, were softly padding along the road on their way to the trenches, to relieve the staled fighters. The wide silence was only broken by the occasional sharp clatter and ping of some lonely sniper's rifle.

It was ten o'clock of the evening, and the ambulance had gone out one mile beyond the hamlet of Hoogar. The Doctor and Hilda alighted at the thick wood, which had been hotly contended for, through the seven days. It had been covered with shell fire as thoroughly as a fishing-net rakes a stream. They waited for Woffington to turn the car around. It is wise to leave a car headed in the direction of safety, when one is treading on disputed ground.

A man stepped out of the wood.

"Are you Red Cross?" he asked.

"Yes," said Dr. McDonnell, "and we have our motor ambulance here."

"Good!" answered the stranger. "We have some wounded men in the Château at the other side of the wood. Come with me."

"How far?" asked Hilda.

"Oh, not more than half a mile."

They seeped along over the wet wood road, speaking not at all, as snipers were scattered by night here and there in the trees. They came to the old white building, a country house of size and beauty. In the cellar, three soldiers were lying on straw. Two of them told Hilda they had been lying wounded and uncared for in the trenches since evening of the night before. They had just been brought to the house. She went over to the third, a boy of about eighteen years. He was shot through the biceps muscle of his left arm. He was pale and weak.

"How long have you been like this?" asked the girl.

"Since four o'clock, yesterday," he whispered.

"Thirty hours," said Hilda.

Dr. McDonnell made a request to the officer for help. He gave four men and two stretchers. They put the boy and one of the men on the stretchers, and hoisted them through the cellar window. Woffington and McDonnell took the lantern and searched till they found a wheelbarrow. The third man, wounded in the shoulder, threw an arm over Dr. McDonnell, and Woffington steadied him at the waist. He stumbled up the steps, and collapsed into the barrow.

Woffington and the Doctor took turns in wheeling him through the mud. Hilda walked at their side. The wheel bit deeply into the road under the weight. They had to spell each other, frequently. After a few hundred yards, they met a small detachment of cavalry, advancing toward the house. The horses seemed to feel the tension, and shared in the silence of their drivers, stepping noiselessly through the murk. Woffington was forced to turn the barrow into the ditch. It required the strength of the two men, one at each handle, to shove it out on the road again.

The stretchers had reached the ambulance ahead of the wheelbarrow. They loaded the car hastily--there was no time to swing stretchers. They put the three wounded in on the long wooden seat. The boy with the torn biceps fainted on Hilda's shoulder. She rode in with him. At Hoogar dressing-station, she asked the military doctor for water for the boy. He had come to, and kept whispering--"Water, water."

"I have no water for you," said the Doctor.

A soldier followed her back to the car and gave the lad to drink from his bottle. There was only a swallow in it.

When they reached the Convent, the officer in charge came running out.

"I'll take this load, but that's all," he said. "Can't take any more, full up. Next trip, go on into the town, to Military Hospital Number Three."

They started back toward the wood.

"I've only got petrol enough for one trip, and then home again," said Woffington.

"All the way, then," said the Doctor, "out to the farthest trenches. We'll make a clean sweep."

They shot past Hoogar, and out through the wood, and on to the trenches of the Cheshires. Just back of the mounded earth, the reserves were sleeping in the mud of the road, and on the wet bank of the ditch. The night was dark and silent. A few rods to the right, a shelled barn was blazing.

"Have you any wounded?" asked Dr. McDonnell.

"So many we haven't gathered them in," answered the officer. "What is the use? No one to carry them away."

"I'll carry as many as I can," said the Doctor.