ights in it, and a twinkle of humor. His voice was low and
even-toned. He lifted the wounded in from the trenches, dressed their
wounds, and sent them back to the base hospitals. He was regimental
dentist as well as Doctor, and accompanied his men from point to point,
along the battlefront from the sea to the frontier. Van der Helde was
his name. He called on the Corps soon after their arrival in Furnes, one
of the last bits of Belgian soil unoccupied by the invaders.

"You are wandering about like lost souls," he said to them; "let me tell
you how to get to work."

He did so. As the results of his suggestions, the six motor ambulances
and four touring cars ran out each morning to the long thin line of
troops that lay burrowed in the wet earth, all the way from the Baths of
Nieuport-on-the-Sea down through the shelled villages of the
Ramskappele-Dixmude frontier to the beautiful ancient city of Ypres.
The cars returned with their patient freight of wounded through the
afternoon and evening.

What had begun as an adventure deepened to a grim fight against
blood-poisoning and long-continuing exposure and hunger. Hilda learned
to drop the antiseptic into open wounds, to apply the pad, and roll the
cotton. She learned to cut away the heavy army blue cloth to reach the
spurting artery. She built the fire that heated the soup. She
distributed the clean warm socks. Doubtless someone else could have done
the work more skilfully, but the someone else was across the water in a
comfortable country house, or watching the Russian dancers at the
Coliseum.

The leader of the Corps, Dr. McDonnell, was an absurdly brave little
man. His heart may not have been in the Highlands, but his mind
certainly was, for he led his staff into shell fire, week-days and
Sundays, and all with a fine unconsciousness that anything unusual was
singing and breaking around the path of their performance. He carried a
pocket edition of the Oxford Book of Verse, and in the lulls of
slaughter turned to the Wordsworth sonnets with a fine relish.

"Something is going to happen. I can feel it coming," said Mrs. Bracher
after one of these excursions into the troubled regions.

"Yes," agreed Hilda, "they are long chances we are taking, but we are
fools for luck."

A famous war correspondent paid them a fleeting visit, before he was
ordered twenty miles back to Dunkirk by Kitchener.

"By the law of probabilities," he observed to Dr. McDonnell, as he was
say