“Ca y est,” said my driver friend, very cheerfully.  He was a gentleman volunteer with his own ambulance and looked like a seafaring man in his round yachting cap and blue jersey.  He did not speak much French, I fancy, but I loved to hear him say that “Ca y est,” when he raised a stretcher in his hefty arms and packed a piece of bleeding flesh into the top of his car with infinite care lest he should give a jolt to broken bones.

One of the men behind us had his leg smashed in two places.  As we went over roads with great stones and the rubbish of ruined houses he cried out again and again in a voice of anguish: 

“Pas si vite!  Pour l’amour de Dieu...  Pas si vite!”

Not so quickly.  But when we came out of the burnt streets towards the level crossing of the railway it seemed best to go quickly.  Shells were falling in the fields quite close to us.  One of them dug a deep hole in the road twenty yards ahead of us.  Another burst close behind.  Instinctively I yearned for speed.  I wanted to rush along that road and get beyond the range of fire.  But the driver in the blue jersey, hearing that awful cry behind him, slowed down and crawled along.

“Poor devil,” he said.  “I can imagine what it feels like when two bits of broken bone get rubbing together.  Every jolt and jar must give him hell.”

He went slower still, at a funeral pace, and looking back into the ambulance said “Ca y est, mon vieux...  Bon courage!”

Afterwards, this very gallant gentleman was wounded himself, and lay in one of the ambulances which he had often led towards adventure, with a jagged piece of steel in his leg, and two bones rasping together at every jolt.  But when he was lifted up, he stifled a groan and gave his old cheerful cry of “Ca y est!”

11

During the two days that followed the convent at Furnes was overcrowded with the wounded.  All day long and late into the night they were brought back by the Belgian ambulances from the zone of fire, and hardly an hour passed without a bang at the great wooden gates in the courtyard which were flung open to let in another tide of human wreckage.

The Belgians were still holding their last remaining ground—­it did not amount to more than a few fields and villages between the French frontier and Dixmude—­with a gallant resistance which belongs without question to the heroic things of history.  During these late days in October, still fighting almost alone, for there were no British soldiers to help them and only a few French batteries with two regiments of French marines, they regained some of their soil and beat back the enemy from positions to which it had advanced.  In spite of the most formidable attacks made by the German troops along the coastline between Westende and Ostende, and in a crescent sweeping round Dixmude for about thirty kilometres, those Belgian soldiers, tired out by months of fighting with decimated regiments and with but the