passing. There was room for everybody but wounded. Fortunately there were few wounded in those early days when rescuers tingled for the chance to serve and see. So the Ghent experience was a probation rather than a fulfilled success. Then the enemy descended from fallen Antwerp, and the Corps sped away, ahead of the vast gray Prussian machine, through Bruges and Ostend, to Furnes. Here, too, in Furnes, the Corps was still trying to find its place in the immense and intricate scheme of war.

The man that saved them from their fogged incertitude was a Belgian doctor, a military Red Cross worker. The first flash of him was of a small silent man, not significant. But when you had been with him, you felt reserves of force. That small person had a will of his own. He was thirty-one years of age, with a thoughtful but kindly face. His eye had pleasant lights 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 saying good-bye, "you and your staff are going to be wiped out, if you keep on running your motors into excitement."

The Doctor smiled. It was doubtful if he heard the man.

One day, the Doctor got hold of Smith, a London boy driver, and Hilda, and said:

"I think we would better visit Dixmude, this morning. It sounds like guns in that direction. That means work for us. Get your hat, my dear."

"But I never wear a hat," she said with a touch of irritation.

"Ah, I hadn't noticed," returned the Doctor, and he hadn't. Hilda went free and fair those days, with uncovered head. Where the men went, there went she. For the modern woman has put aside fear along with the other impediments. The Doctor and Hilda, and, lastly, Smith, 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, and a huge red cross on the top to claim immunity from aeroplanes with bombs and plumbed arrows.

"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. It unfolded itself in a little white cloud, which hung motionless for an instant before the winds of the morning shredded it.

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:—

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.

They took the poplar-lined drive-way that leads to the crossroads. They turned east, and made for Caeskerke. And now Smith let out his engine, for it is not wise to delay along a road that is in clear sight and range of active guns. At Caeskerke station, they halted for reports on the situation in Dixmude.

There, they saw their good friend, Dr. van der Helde, in the little group behind the wooden building of the station.

"I have just come from Dixmude," he said; "it is under a fairly heavy fire. The Hospital of St. Jean is up by the trenches. I have thirty poor old people there, who were left in the town when the bombardment started. They have been under shell fire for four days, and their nerves are gone. They are paralyzed with fright, and cannot walk. I brought them to the hospital from the cellars where they were hiding. I have come back here to try to get cars to take them to Furnes. Will you help me get them?"

"That's what we're here for," said Dr. McDonnell.

"Thank you," said the Belgian quietly. "Shall we not leave the lady?" he suggested, turning to Hilda.

"Try it," she replied with a smile.

Dr. van der Helde jumped aboard.

"And you mean to tell me you couldn't get hold of an army car to help you out, all this time?" asked Dr. McDonnell, in amazement.

"Orders were strict," replied the Belgian; "the military considered it too dangerous to risk an ambulance."