Nobody answered the question.  The wounded men with us were very quiet.  I thought they were dead.  There was only the incessant cannonade and the crashing of buildings.  Mitrailleuses were at work now spitting out bullets.  It was a worse sound than the shells.  It seemed more deadly in its rattle.  I stared back behind the car and saw the other ambulance in our wake.  I did not see the motor-car.  Along the country road the fields were still being ploughed by shell, which burst over our heads.  We came to a halt again at the place where the soldiers were crouched under the cottage walls.  There were few walls now, and inside some of the remaining cottages many wounded men.  Their own comrades were giving them first aid, and wiping the blood out of their eyes.  We managed to take some of these on board.  They were less quiet than the others we had, and groaned in a heartrending way.

And then, a little later, we made a painful discovery.  Lieutenant de Broqueville, our gallant young leader, was missing.  By some horrible mischance he had not taken his place in either of the ambulances or the motor-car.  None of us had the least idea what had happened to him.  We had all imagined that he had scrambled up like the rest of us, after giving the order to get away.  We looked at each other in dismay.  There was only one thing to do, to get back in search of him.  Even in the half-hour since we had left the town Dixmude had burst into flames and was a great blazing torch.  If young de Broqueville were left in that furnace he would not have a chance of life.

It was Gleeson and another stretcher-bearer who with great gallantry volunteered to go back and search for our leader.  They took the light car and sped back towards the burning town.

The ambulances went on with their cargo of wounded, and I was left in a car with one of the ladies while Dr. Munro was ministering to a man on the point of death.  It was the girl whom I had seen on the lawn of an old English house in the days before the war.  She was very worried about the fate of de Broqueville, and anxious beyond words as to what would befall the three friends who were now missing.  We drove back along the road towards Dixmude, and rescued another wounded man left in a wayside cottage.  By this time there were five towns blazing in the darkness, and in spite of the awful suspense which we were now suffering, we could not help staring at the fiendish splendour of that sight.  Dr. Munro joined us again, and after a consultation we decided to get as near Dixmude as we could, in ease our friends had to come out without their car or wounded.

The enemy’s bombardment was now terrific.  All its guns were concentrated upon Dixmude and the surrounding trenches.  In the darkness close under a stable wall I stood listening to the great crashes for an hour, when I had not expected such a grace of life.  Inside the stable, soldiers were sleeping in the straw, careless that any moment a shell might burst through upon them and give them unwaking sleep.  The hour seemed a night.  Then we saw the gleam of headlights, and an English voice called out.