She thought:  Here’s Antwerp falling and Belgium beaten.  And all those wounded.  And the dead....  And here am I, bothering about these little things, as if they mattered.  Three little things.

* * * * *

The fire from the battlefield had raked the village street as they came in; but it had ceased now.  The cure had been through it all, going up and down, helping with the stretchers.  John was down there in the wine-shop, where the soldiers were, looking for more wounded.

They had found five in the stable yard, waiting to be taken away; they had moved four of them into the ambulance.  The fifth, shot through the back of his head, still lay on the ground on a stretcher that dripped blood.  Charlotte stood beside him.

The cure came to her there.  He was slender and lean in his black cassock.  He had a Red Cross brassard on his sleeve, and in one hand he carried his missal and in the other the Host and the holy oils in a little bag of purple silk.  He looked down at the stretcher and he looked at Charlotte, smiling faintly.

“Where is Monsieur?” he said.

“In the wine-shop, looking for wounded.”

She thought:  He isn’t looking, for them.  He’s skulking there, out of the firing.  He’ll always be like that.

It had begun again.  The bullets whistled in the air and rapped on the stone causeway, and ceased.  The cure glanced down the street towards the place they had come from and smiled again.

She liked his lean dark face and the long lines that came in it when it smiled.  It despised the firing, it despised death, it despised everything that could be done to him there.  And it was utterly compassionate.

“Then,” he said, “it is for you and me to carry him, Mademoiselle.”  He stooped to the stretcher.

Between them they lifted him very slowly and gently into the ambulance.

“There, Monsieur, at the bottom.”

At the bottom because of the steady drip, drip, that no bandaging could staunch.  He lay straight and stiff, utterly unconcerned, and his feet in their enormous boots, slightly parted, stuck out beyond the stretcher.  The four others sat in a row down one side of the car and stared at him.

The cure climbed in after him, carrying the Host.  He knelt there, where the blood from the smashed head oozed through the bandages and through the canvas of the stretchers to the floor and to the skirts of his cassock.

The Last Sacrament.  Charlotte waited till it was over, standing stolidly by the tail of the car.  She could have cried then because of the sheer beauty of the cure’s act, even while she wondered whether perhaps the wafer on his tongue might not choke the dying man.

The cure hovered on the edge of the car, stooping with a certain awkwardness; she took from him his missal and his purple bag as he gathered his cassock about him and came down.