She thought: He isn't looking, for them. He's skulking there, out of the
firing. He'll always be like that.

It had begun again. The bullets whistled in the air and rapped on the
stone causeway, and ceased. The curé glanced down the street towards the
place they had come from and smiled again.

She liked his lean dark face and the long lines that came in it when it
smiled. It despised the firing, it despised death, it despised everything
that could be done to him there. And it was utterly compassionate.

"Then," he said, "it is for you and me to carry him, Mademoiselle." He
stooped to the stretcher.

Between them they lifted him very slowly and gently into the ambulance.

"There, Monsieur, at the bottom."

At the bottom because of the steady drip, drip, that no bandaging could
staunch. He lay straight and stiff, utterly unconcerned, and his feet in
their enormous boots, slightly parted, stuck out beyond the stretcher.
The four others sat in a row down one side of the car and stared at him.

The curé climbed in after him, carrying the Host. He knelt there,
where the blood from the smashed head oozed through the bandages and
through the canvas of the stretchers to the floor and to the skirts of
his cassock.

The Last Sacrament. Charlotte waited till it was over, standing stolidly