“There’s an emergency hospital just beyond that clump of trees,” he said.  “You’d better take him there.  Golly! but he’s hard hit.  I guess that bullet found its billet.  There’s not much hope when it’s a belly-whopper.  Too bad, ain’t it?  He was a bully old boy of a colonel; we all said so in the dragoons.  Only—­to hell with those lances of yours, Berkley!  What cursed good are they alongside a gun?  And I notice your regiment has its carbineers, too—­which proves that your lances are no good or you wouldn’t have twelve carbines to the troop.  Eh?  Oh, you bet your boots, sonny.  Don’t talk lance to me!  It’s all on account of those Frenchmen on Little Mac’s staff——­”

“For God’s sake shut up!” said Berkley nervously.  “I can’t stand any more just now.”

“Oh!” said Casson, taken aback, “I didn’t know you were such cronies with your Colonel.  Sorry, my dear fellow; didn’t mean to seem indifferent.  Poor old gentleman.  I guess he will pull through.  There are nurses at the front—­nice little things.  God bless ’em!  Say, don’t you want to climb up with the driver?”

Berkley hesitated.  “Do you know where my regiment is?  I ought to go back—­if there’s anybody to look after Colonel Arran——­”

“Is that your horse?”

“No—­some staff officer’s, I guess.”

“Where’s yours?”

“Dead,” said Berkley briefly.  He thought a moment, then tied his horse to the tail-board and climbed up beside the driver.

“Go on,” he said; “drive carefully”, and he nodded his thanks to Casson as the team swung north.

The Provost Guard, filing along, carbines on thigh, opened to let him through; and he saw them turning in their saddles to peer curiously into the straw as the ambulance passed.

It was slow going, for the road was blocked with artillery and infantry and other ambulances, but the driver found a lane between guns and caissons and through the dusty blue columns plodding forward toward the firing line; and at last a white hospital tent glimmered under the trees, and the slow mule team turned into a leafy lane and halted in the rear of a line of ambulances which were all busily discharging their mangled burdens.  The cries of the wounded were terrible.

Operating tables stood under the trees in the open air; assistants sponged the blood from them continually; the overworked surgeons, stripped to their undershirts, smeared with blood, worked coolly and rapidly in the shade of the oak-trees, seldom raising their voices, never impatient.  Orderlies brought water in artillery buckets; ward-masters passed swiftly to and fro; a soldier stood by a pile of severed limbs passing out bandages to assistants who swarmed around, scurrying hither and thither under the quiet orders of the medical directors.

A stretcher was brought; Colonel Arran opened his heavy lids as they placed him in it.  His eyes summoned Berkley.