that terrible look that Mr. Davidson told me he saw on the faces of
Belgians in retreat from [?] Zele. There was no terror in them, only a
sort of sullen annoyance and disgust.

I was walking beside the Commandant, and how I managed to get mixed up
with this battery I don't know. First of all it held me up when it
turned, then when I got through, it still came on and cut me off from
the Commandant. (The rest of the Corps were with the Ambulance in the
middle of the village.)

Then, through the plunging train, I caught sight of the innocent
Commandant, all by himself, strolling serenely towards the open road,
where beyond the bend the Germans were presumably pursuing the battery.
It was terribly alarming to see the Commandant advancing to meet them,
all alone, without a word of German to protect him.

There were gaps in the retreat, and I dashed through one of them (as you
dash through the traffic in the Strand when you're in a hurry) and went
after the Commandant with the brilliant idea of defending him with a
volley of bad German hurled at the enemy's head.

And the Commandant went on, indifferent both to his danger and to his
salvation, and disappeared down a little lane and into a house where a
wounded man was. I stood at the end of the lane with the sublime
intention of guarding it.

The Commandant came out presently. He looked as if he were steeped in a
large, vague leisure, and he asked me to go and find Mr. Lambert and his
scouting-car. Mr. Lambert had got to go to Lokeren to fetch some
wounded.

So I ran back down the village and found Mr. Lambert and his car at the
other end of it. He accepted his destiny with a beautiful transatlantic
calm and dashed off to Lokeren. I do not think he took his wife with him
this time.[20]

I went back to see if the Germans had got any nearer to the Commandant.
They hadn't. What with dressings and bandages and looking for wounded,
the Ambulance must have worked for about half an hour, and not any
Germans had turned the corner yet.

It was still busy getting its load safely stowed away. Nothing for the
wretched Secretary to do but to stand there at the far end of the
village, looking up the road to Lokeren. There was a most singular
fascination about the turn of that road beyond the trees.

Suddenly, at what seemed the last minute of safety, two Belgian
stretcher-bearers, without a stretcher, rushed up to me. They said there
was a man badly wounded in some house somew