roken bones to jolt and increased the pounding of their wearied nerves
to an extremity of agony. The fourth occupant of the ambulance, he
said, had been shot through the lungs.

Some distance along, there came a knock on the wooden partition behind
my back,--the partition that separates the driver's seat from the
ambulance proper. The car stopped and the driver and Hartzell went to
the rear door and opened it. The man with the shot through the lungs was
half sitting up on his stretcher. He had one hand to his mouth and his
lips, as revealed in the rays of the driver's flashlight, were red wet.

"Quick--get me--to a doctor," the man said between gulps and gurgles.

The driver considered. He knew we were ten miles from the closest doctor.
Then he addressed himself to the other three stretcher-cases--the men
with the torture-torn legs.

"If I go fast, you guys are going to suffer the agonies of hell," he
said, "and if I go slow this guy with the hemorrhage will croak before
we get there. How do you want me to drive?"

There was not a minute's silence. The three broken leg cases responded
almost in unison.

"Go as fast as you can," they said.

And we did. With Hartzell riding the running board beside me and the
crater finder clinging to the mud guards on the other side, we sped
through the darkness regardless of the ruts and shell holes. The jolting
was severe but never once did there come another complaint from the
occupants of the ambulance.

In this manner did we arrive in time at the first medical clearing
station. I learned later that the life of the man with the hemorrhage
was saved and he is alive to-day.

The clearing station was located in an old church on the outskirts of a
little village. Four times during this war the flow and ebb of battle
had passed about this old edifice. Hartzell half carried me off the
ambulance seat and into the church. As I felt my feet scrape on the
flagstoned flooring underneath the Gothic entrance arch, I opened my
right eye for a painful survey of the interior.

The walls, grey with age, appeared yellow in the light of the candles
and lanterns that were used for illumination. Blankets, and bits of
canvas and carpet had been tacked over the apertures where once stained
glass windows and huge oaken doors had been. These precautions were
necessary to prevent the lights from shining outside the building and
betraying our location to the hospital-loving eyes of German bombing
'