en hit in several places; but the worst
wound was in the leg, where an artery had been cut. He was weak,
with a sort of where-am-I look in his eyes. If the fragment which had
hit his leg had hit his head, or his neck, or his abdomen, he would
have been killed instantly. He was also an illustration of how hard it is
to kill a man even with several shell-fragments, unless some of them
strike in the right place. For he was going to live; the surgeon had
whispered the fact in his ear, that one important fact. He had beaten
the German shell, after all.

Returning by the same road by which we came a motor-car ran swiftly
by, the only kind of car allowed on that road. We had a glimpse of the
big, painted red cross on an ambulance side, and at the rear, where
the curtains were rolled up for ventilation, of four pairs of soldier boot-
soles at the end of four stretchers, which had been slid into place at
the estaminet by the sturdy, kindly, experienced medical corps men.

Before we reached the village where our car waited, the ambulance
passed us on the way back to the estaminet. Very soon after the
shell-burst, a telephone bell had rung down the line from the extreme
front calling for an ambulance and stating the number of men hit, so
that everybody would know what to prepare for. At the village, which
was outside the immediate danger zone, was another clearing
station. Here the stretchers were taken into a house--taken without a
jolt by men who were specialists in handling stretchers--for any re-
dressing if necessary, before another ambulance started journey,
with motor-trucks and staff motor-cars giving right of way, to a
spotless, white hospital ship which would take them home to England
the next night.

It had been an incident of life at the front, and of the organization of
war, causing less flurry than an ambulance call to an accident in a
great city.

XXVI
Finding The Grand Fleet

Good fortune slipped a message across the Channel to the British
front, which became the magic carpet of transition from the life of the
burrowing army in its trenches to the life of battleships; from motors
trailing dust over French roads, to destroyers trailing foam in choppy
seas off English coasts.

But there was more than one place to go in that wonderful week;
more than ships to see if one would know something of the intricate,
busy world of the Admiralty's work, which makes coastguards a part
of its personnel. The trans