Working as Hilda worked, with her two efficient friends and a well-equipped dressing-station, their own hospital only seven miles to the rear of them, she had been able to measure up to any situation that had been thrust at her. It was buckle to it, and work furiously, and clean up the mess, and then on to the next. But here was a wide-spread misery that overwhelmed her. Dr. McDonnell was as silent as the girl. He had a sensitiveness to suffering which twenty years of London practice had not dulled.

[121]

[121]

The day wore along, with spurt after spurt to the front, and then the slower drive back, when Woffington guided the car patiently and skilfully, so that the wounded men inside should not be shaken by the motion. They had a snack of luncheon with them, and ate it while they rode. Their little barrel of water, swinging between the wheels, had long ago gone to fevered men.

"First ambulance I've seen in twenty-four hours," said Captain Davies, as he came on them out of the dusk of Hoogar wood. The stern and unbending organization of the military had found it necessary to hold a hundred or more ambulances of the Royal Army Medical Corps in readiness all day in the market place of Ypres against a sudden evacuation. So there were simply no cars, but their one car, to speed out to the front and gather the wounded.

It was strange, in the evening light, to work out along the road between lines [122]of poplar trees. Dim forms kept passing them—two by two, each couple with a stretcher and its burden. An old farm cart came jogging by, wrenching its body from side to side as it struck invisible hummocks and dipped into shell holes. It was loaded with outstretched forms of men, whose wounds were torn at by the jerking of the cart. In companies, fresh men, talking in whispers, were softly padding along the road on their way to the trenches, to relieve the staled fighters. The wide silence was only broken by the occasional sharp clatter and ping of some lonely sniper's rifle.

[122]

It was ten o'clock of the evening, and the ambulance had gone out one mile beyond the hamlet of Hoogar. The Doctor and Hilda alighted at the thick wood, which had been hotly contended for, through the seven days. It had been covered with shell fire as thoroughly as a fishing-net rakes a stream. They [123]waited for Woffington to turn the car around. It is wise to leave a car headed in the direction of safety, when one is treading on disputed 

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