climbed aboard and started at fair speed.

Smith's motor-ambulance was a swift machine, canopied by a brown hood, the color of a Mediterranean sail, with red crosses on the sides to ward off shells, [17]and a huge red cross on the top to claim immunity from aeroplanes with bombs and plumbed arrows.

[17]

"Make haste, make haste," urged Dr. McDonnell, who felt all time was wasted that was not spent where the air was thick. They had ridden for a half hour.

"There are limits, sir," replied Smith. "If you will look at that piece of road ahead, sir, you will see that it's been chewed up with Jack Johnsons. It's hard on the machine."

But the Doctor's attention was already far away, for he had been seized with the beauty of the fresh spring morning. There was a tang in the air, and sense of awakening life in the ground, which not all the bleakness of the wasted farms and the dead bodies of cattle could obscure for him.

"Isn't that pretty," he observed, as a shrapnel exploded overhead in the blue with that ping with which it breaks its casing and releases the pattering bullets.[18] It unfolded itself in a little white cloud, which hung motionless for an instant before the winds of the morning shredded it.

[18]

To Hilda the sensation of being under fire was always exhilarating. The thought of personal peril never entered her head. The verse of a favorite gypsy song often came into her memory these days:—

"I am breath, dew, all resources.

Laughing in your face, I cry

Would ye kill me, save your forces.

Why kill me, who cannot die."

They swept on to Oudekappele and its stout stone church, where lonely in the tower, the watcher, leaning earthward, told off his observations of the enemy to a soldier in the rafters, who passed them to another on the ladder, who dropped them to another on the stone floor, who hurried them to an officer at the telephone in the west front, who spoke them to a battery one mile away.

[19]

[19]

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