“But,” John said, “we’ve got orders to go on.”

A shrug intimated that their orders were not the lieutenant’s affair.  They couldn’t go on.

“But we must go on.  We’ve got to fetch some wounded.”

“There aren’t any wounded,” said the lieutenant.

Charlotte had an inspiration.  “You tell us that tale every time,” she said, “and there are always wounded.”

The Belgian guide and the lieutenant exchanged glances.

“I’ve told you there aren’t any,” the lieutenant said.  “You must go back.”

“Here—­You explain.”

But instead of explaining the little Belgian backed up the lieutenant by a refusal on his own part to go on.

“He can please himself. We’re going on.”

“You don’t imagine,” Charlotte said, “by any chance that we’re afraid?”

The lieutenant smiled, a smile that lifted his ferocious, upturned moustache:  first sign that he was yielding.  He looked at the sergeant and the corporal, and they nodded.

John had his foot on the clutch.  “We’re due,” he said, “at the dressing station by three o’clock.”

She thought:  He’s magnificent.  She could see that the lieutenant and the soldiers thought he was magnificent.  Supposing she had gone out with some meek fool who would have gone back when they told him!

The lieutenant skipped aside before the advancing car.  “You can go,” he said, “to the dressing-station.”

“They always do that as a matter of form—­sort of warning us that it’s our own risk.  They won’t be responsible.”

She didn’t answer.  She was thinking that when they turned John’s driving place would be towards the German guns.

“I wish you’d let me drive.  You know I like driving.”

“Not this time.”

At the dressing-station, a deserted store, they found a Belgian Army Medical officer engaged with a tired and flushed and dirty soldier.  He was bandaging his left hand which had made a trail of blood splashes from the street to the counter.  The right hand hung straight down from a nick in the dropped wrist where a tendon had been severed.  He told them that they had grasped the situation.  Seven men waited there for transport.

The best thing—­perhaps—­He looked doubtfully at Charlotte—­would be for them to take these men back at once. (The tired soldier murmured something:  a protest or an entreaty.) Though they were not exactly urgent cases.  They could wait.

Charlotte suspected a serious reservation.  “You mean you have others more urgent?”

The soldier got in his word.  “Much more.”  His lips and eyes moved excitedly in the flush and grime.

“Well yes,” the doctor admitted that they had.  Not in the village, but in a hamlet about a mile outside of it.  An outpost.  This man and three others had been holding it with two machine guns.  He had had a finger shot away and his wrist cut open by a shell-burst; the other three were left there, badly wounded.