I went down the wide staircase.  An ambulance had stopped and its burden was being carried in.  The bearers rested the stretcher gently on the floor, and a nurse was immediately on her knees beside it.

“Shell!” she said.

The occupant was a boy of perhaps nineteen—­a big boy.  Some mother must have been very proud of him.  He was fully conscious, and he looked up from his stained bandages with the same searching glance that now I have seen so often—­the glance that would read its chances in the faces of those about.  With his uninjured arm he threw back the blanket.  His right arm was wounded, broken in two places, but not shattered.

“He’ll do nicely,” said the nurse.  “A broken jaw and the arm.”

His eyes were on me, so I bent over.

“The nurse says you will do nicely,” I assured him.  “It will take time, but you will be very comfortable here, and—­”

The nurse had been making further investigation.  Now she turned back the other end of the blanket His right leg had been torn off at the hip.

That story has an end; for that boy died.

The drive back to Dunkirk was a mad one.  Afterward I learned to know that red-headed Flemish chauffeur, with his fiercely upcurled moustache and his contempt of death.  Rather, perhaps, I learned to know his back.  It was a reckless back.  He wore a large army overcoat with a cape and a cap with a tassel.  When he really got under way at anything from fifty miles an hour to the limit of the speedometer, which was ninety miles, the gilt tassel, which in the Belgian cap hangs over and touches the forehead, had a way of standing up; the cape overcoat blew out in the air, cutting off my vision and my last hope.

I regard that chauffeur as a menace on the high road.  Certainly he is not a lady’s chauffeur.  He never will be.  Once at night he took me—­and the car—­into an iron railroad gate, and bent the gate into a V. I was bent into the whole alphabet.

The car was a limousine.  After that one cold ride from Calais to La Panne I was always in a limousine—­always, of course, where a car could go at all.  There may be other writers who have been equally fortunate, but most of the stories are of frightful hardships.  I was not always comfortable.  I was frequently in danger.  But to and from the front I rode soft and warm and comfortable.  Often I had a bottle of hot coffee and sandwiches.  Except for the two carbines strapped to the speedometer, except for the soldier-chauffeur and the orderly who sat together outside, except for the eternal consulting of maps and showing of passes, I might have been making a pleasure tour of the towns of Northern France and Belgium.  In fact, I have toured abroad during times of peace and have been less comfortable.

I do not speak Flemish, so I could not ask the chauffeur to desist, slow down, or let me out to walk.  I could only sit tight as the machine flew round corners, elbowed transports, and threw a warning shriek to armoured cars.  I wondered what would happen if we skidded into a wagon filled with high explosives.  I tried to remember the conditions of my war insurance policy at Lloyd’s.  Also I recalled the unpleasant habit the sentries have of firing through the back of any car that passes them.