en left behind who now
might help her. But the solitude was ghastly. She called again and
again, screaming that some of her unit had been shelled with the man
they were bringing in. The pity of this seemed infinitely worse than the
wounding of combatants; yet the ditch remained utterly devoid of
life--the only answer she seemed to catch was that it waited merely to
embrace the dead. Without giving a further thought to dangers, she
sprang up and ran out across the field.

Going breathlessly, she watched for a glimpse of the brown stretcher.
Prone bodies might not have guided her aright, for there were several of
these; but the point she sought would have a stretcher, and there had
been no other stretchers within sight. Then she came upon it. Hastings
lay as he had fallen. One hand still grasped the handle--it was his left
hand, the side whereon he wore the Red Cross emblem. Quick tears blinded
her, but she brushed them away and kneeled by the wounded soldier. He
lived, although merciful unconsciousness had come to him. She looked
hastily around to see--at the same time wanting not to see--where the
other man had fallen, and shuddered when she realized that he must have
been blown to dust. The wounded soldier, then, was the only one here who
needed her! She started to roll him on the stretcher, intending to drag
it behind her and in this way sled him in; but its poles had been
shattered. She tried to lift him, and found that to be utterly
impossible.

The confusion was maddening out there upon that deserted No Man's Land.
To the dug-out openings, pointing away from it, noises had been
partially tempered; certainly the acrid smoke was less down in the
quadrangle, and she had therefore not been prepared for quite such a
cataclysm. Now a shell burst within fifty feet of her, providentially
first burrowing, but sending a fountain of earth into the air that fell
upon her like hail. Another burst.

In desperation dragging the wounded soldier to a nearby crater she slid
him into it, and was about to follow when checked by a curious
sight--for a man crouched there with his face against the side. One
could have died in that position, yet this man lived because his body
trembled visibly. Encircling his sleeve was the band of the Red Cross,
and upon seeing this she leaped down to him, asking fearfully:

"Are you badly wounded?"

He did not look around, and she laid a hand gently on his arm, not
daring to touch it firmly lest i