“Did you hear that, Mademoiselle?”

“I did.”

“Miles away,” said John.

She knew it wasn’t.  She thought:  He doesn’t want me to know.  He thinks I’ll be frightened.  I mustn’t tell him.

But the Belgian had none of John’s scruples.  The shell was near, he said; very near.  It had fallen in the place they were going to.

“But that’s the place where the wounded men are.”

He admitted that it was the place where the wounded men were.

They were out of the village now.  Their road ran through flat open country, a causeway raised a little above the level of the fields.  No cover anywhere from the fire if it came.  The Belgian had begun again.

“What’s that he’s saying now?”

“He says we shall give away the position of the road.”

“It’s the one they told us to take.  We’ve got to go on it.  He’s in a beastly funk.  That’s what’s the matter with him.”

The Belgian shrugged his shoulders as much as to say he had done his duty and things might now take their course, and they were mistaken if for one minute they supposed he was afraid.  But they had not gone fifty yards before he begged to be put down.  He said it was absolutely necessary that he should go back to the village and collect the wounded there and have them ready for the ambulance on its return.

They let him go.  Charlotte looked round the corner of the hood and saw him running with brief, jerky strides.

“He’s got a nerve,” said John, “to be able to do it.”

“What excuse do you think he’ll make?”

“Oh, he’ll say we sent him.”

The straight dyke of the road went on and on.  Seen from the sunk German lines the heavy ambulance car would look like a house on wheels running along a wall.  She thought again of John on his exposed seat.  If only he had let her drive—­But that was absurd.  Of course he wouldn’t let her.  If you were to keep on thinking of the things that might happen to John—­Meanwhile nothing could take from them the delight of this dangerous run across the open.  She had to remind herself that the adventure, the romance of it was not what mattered most; it was not the real thing, the thing they had gone out for.

When they came to the wounded, when they came to the wounded, then it would begin.

The hamlet began to show now; it sat on one side of the road, low and alone in the flat land, an open field in front of it, and at the bottom of the field the river and a line of willows, and behind the willows the Germans, hidden.  White smoke curled among the branches.  You could see it was an outpost, one of the points at which the Germans, if they broke through, would come into the village.  They supposed that the house where the wounded men were would be the last of the short row.

Here on their right there were no houses, only the long, high flank of a barn.  The parts that had been built out into the field were shelled away, but the outer wall by the roadside still held.  It was all that stood between them and the German guns.  They drew up the car under its shelter and got down.