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Just after La Buissiere we came
to a tiny village named Neuville and halted while the local Jack-of-all-
trades mended for us an invalided tire on a bicycle.
As we grouped in the narrow street before his shop, with a hiving swarm
of curious villagers buzzing about us, an improvised ambulance, with a
red cross painted on its side over the letters of a baker's sign, went
up the steep hill at the head of the cobbled street. At that the women
in the doorways of the small cottages twisted their gnarled red hands in
their aprons, and whispered fearsomely among themselves, so that the
sibilant sound of their voices ran up and down the line of houses in a
long, quavering hiss.
The wagon, it seemed, was bringing in a wounded French soldier who had
been found in the woods beyond the river. He was one of the last to be
found alive, which was another way of saying that for two days and two
nights he had been lying helpless in the thicket, his stomach empty and
his wounds raw. On each of those two nights it had rained, and rained
hard.


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