It was in the darkness that I went back to Furnes again, with the last of the wounded—­a French corporal, who groaned in anguish at every jolt in the road, and then was silent with his head flopping sideways in a way that frightened me.  Several times I called back to him, “Courage, mon vieux! ...  Comment allez vous?” But he made no answer and there were times when I thought I had a dead man behind me.  A biting wind was blowing, and I leaned over his seat to put a blanket over him.  But it always blew off that dead-grey face and blood-stained body.  Once he groaned, and I was glad to hear the sound and to know that he was still alive.  Another man trudging along the highway, using his rifle as a crutch, called out.  He spoke the word blesse, and I stopped to take him up and sped on again, glancing to right and left at the villages on fire, at the quick flashes of Belgian and German artillery signalling death to each other in the night.  The straight trees rushed by like tall, hurrying ghosts.  For most of the way we drove without our head-lights through tunnels of darkness.  “Queer, isn’t it?” said my driver, and it was his only comment on this adventure in the strangest drama of his life.

19

That night the wind came howling across the flat fields into Furnes and a rain-storm broke in fierce gusts upon the convent walls.  In this old building with many corridors and innumerable windows, panes of glass rattled and window-sashes creaked and doors banged like thunderclaps.  It was impossible to keep a candle alight down any of the passages unless it were protected in a lantern, and a cold mist crept into the house, stealthily striking one with a clammy chill.  I stayed up most of the night in the kitchen, having volunteered to stoke the fires and fill hot-water bottles for the wounded.  Most of the nurses had gone to bed utterly exhausted.  Only two or three of them remained in the wards with one of the doctors.  Every now and then the outer bell would jangle, and I would hear the wheels of an ambulance crunching into the courtyard.

“Blesses!” said a woman who was watching the fires with me.

But we could not take in another blesse as there were no more beds or bed-spaces, and after despairing conversations Belgian ambulance officers at the front door of the convent went elsewhere.  The house became very quiet except for the noise of the wind and the rain.  In the scullery where I sat by the stoves which were in my charge, I could only hear one voice speaking.  It was speaking two rooms away, in a long, incessant monologue of madness.  Now and again a white-faced nurse came out for newly-filled water-bottles, and while I scalded my fingers with screws which would not fit and with boiling water poured into narrow necks, she told me about a French officer who was dying.

“He wants his wife so badly.  He would die quite happily if he could only see her for a minute.  But she is in Paris, and he will be dead before the morning comes...  I have written a letter for him, and he kissed it before I wrote his wife’s address.  He keeps calling out her name.”