“We had gone near to where a machine gun was planted, to pick up a fallen soldier, when without warning the Germans charged the gun.  Maurie and I made a run for life, but Gys stood stock still, facing the enemy.  A man at the gun reeled and fell, just then, and with a hail of bullets flying around him the doctor coolly walked up and bent over him.  The sight so amazed the Germans that they actually stopped fighting and waited for him.  Perhaps it was the Red Cross on the doctor’s arm that influenced them, but imagine a body of soldiers in the heat of a charge suddenly stopping because of one man!”

“Well, what happened?” asked Mr. Merrick.

“I couldn’t see very well, for a battery that supported the charge was shelling the retreating Allies and just then our ambulance was hit.  But Maurie says he watched the scene and that when Gys attempted to lift the wounded man up he suddenly turned weak as water.  The Germans had captured the gun, by this time, and their officer himself hoisted the injured man upon the doctor’s shoulders and attended him to our ambulance.  When I saw the fight was over I hastened to help Gys, who staggered so weakly that he would have dropped his man a dozen times on the way had not the Germans held him up.  They were laughing, as if the whole thing was a joke, when crack! came a volley of bullets and with a great shout back rushed the French and Belgians in a counter-charge.  I admit I ducked, crawling under the ambulance, and the Germans were so surprised that they beat a quick retreat.

“And now it was that Gys made a fool of himself.  He tore off his cap and coat, which bore the Red Cross emblem, and leaped right between the two lines.  Here were the Germans, firing as they retreated, and the Allies firing as they charged, and right in the center of the fray stood Gys.  The man ought to have been shot to pieces, but nothing touched him until a Frenchman knocked him over because he was in the way of the rush.  It was the most reckless, suicidal act I ever heard of!”

Uncle John looked worried.  He had never told any of them of Dr. Gys’ strange remark during their first interview, but he had not forgotten it.  “I’ll be happier when I can shake off this horrible envelope of disfigurement,” the doctor had declared, and in view of this the report of that day’s adventure gave the kind-hearted gentleman a severe shock.

He walked the deck thoughtfully while the girls hurried below to look after the new patients who had been brought, not too comfortably, in the damaged ambulance.  “It was a bad fight,” Ajo had reported, “and the wounded were thick, but we could only bring a few of them.  Before we left the field, however, an English ambulance and two French ones arrived, and that gave us an opportunity to get away.  Indeed, I was so unnerved by the dangers we had miraculously escaped that I was glad to be out of it.”

Uncle John tried hard to understand Doctor Gys, but the man’s strange, abnormal nature was incomprehensible.  When, half an hour later, Mr. Merrick went below, he found the doctor in the operating room, cool and steady of nerve and dressing wounds in his best professional manner.