"I wish you'd let me drive. You know I like driving."
"Not this time."
At the dressing-station, a deserted store, they found a Belgian Army Medical officer engaged with a tired and flushed and dirty soldier. He was bandaging his left hand which had made a trail of blood splashes from the street to the counter. The right hand hung straight down from a nick in the dropped wrist where a tendon had been severed. He told them that they had grasped the situation. Seven men waited there for transport.
The best thing--perhaps--He looked doubtfully at Charlotte--would be for them to take these men back at once. (The tired soldier murmured something: a protest or an entreaty.) Though they were not exactly urgent cases. They could wait.
Charlotte suspected a serious reservation. "You mean you have others more urgent?"
The soldier got in his word. "Much more." His lips and eyes moved excitedly in the flush and grime.
"Well yes," the doctor admitted that they had. Not in the village, but in a hamlet about a mile outside of it. An outpost. This man and three others had been holding it with two machine guns. He had had a finger shot away and his wrist cut open by a shell-burst; the other three were left there, badly wounded.
"All right, we'll go and fetch them."
"Monsieur, the place is being shelled. You have no orders."
"We've no orders not to."
The doctor spread out helpless palms, palms that disclaimed responsibility.
"If you go, you go at your own risk. I will not send you."
"That's all right."
"Oh well--But certainly Mademoiselle must be left behind."
"Mademoiselle is much too useful."
Frantic gestures of eyebrows and palms.
"You must not stay there more than three minutes. Three minutes."
He turned to the cut tendon with an air of integrity, his conscience appeased by laying down this time limit.
John released the clutch, and the soldier shouted out something, they couldn't make out what, that ended with "mitrailleuses."
As they ran down the street the solemn Boom--Boom came right and left; they were now straight between the two batteries.
"Are you all right, Sharlie?"
"Rather."
The little Belgian by her side muttered, protesting.
"We're not really in any danger. It's all going on over our heads."
"Do you suppose," she said, "they'll get our range?"
"Rather not. Why should they? They've got their range and they'll stick to it."