"But," John said, "we've got orders to go on."

A shrug intimated that their orders were not the lieutenant's affair. They couldn't go on.

"But we must go on. We've got to fetch some wounded."

"There aren't any wounded," said the lieutenant.

Charlotte had an inspiration. "You tell us that tale every time," she said, "and there are always wounded."

The Belgian guide and the lieutenant exchanged glances.

"I've told you there aren't any," the lieutenant said. "You must go back."

"Here—You explain."

But instead of explaining the little Belgian backed up the lieutenant by a refusal on his own part to go on.

"He can please himself. We're going on."

"You don't imagine," Charlotte said, "by any chance that we're afraid?"

The lieutenant smiled, a smile that lifted his ferocious, upturned moustache: first sign that he was yielding. He looked at the sergeant and the corporal, and they nodded.

John had his foot on the clutch. "We're due," he said, "at the dressing station by three o'clock."

She thought: He's magnificent. She could see that the lieutenant and the soldiers thought he was magnificent. Supposing she had gone out with some meek fool who would have gone back when they told him!

The lieutenant skipped aside before the advancing car. "You can go," he said, "to the dressing-station."

"They always do that as a matter of form—sort of warning us that it's our own risk. They won't be responsible."

She didn't answer. She was thinking that when they turned John's driving place would be towards the German guns.

"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."

The firing on their right ceased.

"They're quiet enough now," she said.

The little Belgian informed her that if they were quiet so much the worse. They were finding their range.

She thought: We were safe enough before, but—

"Supposing," she said, "they alter their range?"

"They won't alter it just for the fun of killing us. They haven't spotted the batteries yet. It's the batteries they're trying for, not the street."

But the little Belgian went on protesting.

"What's the matter with him?"

"He's getting a bit jumpy," she said, "that's all."

"Tell him to buck up. Tell him it's all right."

She translated. The little Belgian shook his head, mournfully persistent. "Monsieur," he said, "didn't know."

"Oh yes, he does know."

It was absurd of the little man to suppose you didn't know, when the noise of the French guns told them how near they were to the enemy's target.

She tried not to listen to him. His mutterings broke up the queer stillness that held her after she had heard the guns. It was only by keeping still that you felt, wave by wave, the rising thrill of the adventure. Only by keeping still she was aware of what was passing in John's mind. He knew. He knew. They were one in the almost palpable excitement that they shared; locked close, closer than their bodies could have joined them, in the strange and poignant ecstasy of danger.

There was the sound of an explosion somewhere in front of them beyond the houses.

"Did you hear that, Mademoiselle?"

"I did."

"Miles away," said John.

She knew it wasn't. She thought: He doesn't want me to know. He thinks I'll be frightened. I mustn't tell him.

But the Belgian had none of John's scruples. The shell was near, he said; very near. It had fallen in the place they were going to.

"But that's the place where the wounded men are."

He admitted that it was the place where the wounded men were.

They were out of the village now. Their road ran through flat open country, a causeway raised a little above the level of the fields. No cover anywhere from the fire if it came. The Belgian had begun again.

"What's that he's saying now?"

"He says we shall give away the position of the road."

"It's the one they told us to take. We've got to go on it. He's in a beastly funk. That's what's the matter with him."

The Belgian shrugged his shoulders as much as to say he had done his duty and things might now take their course, and they were mistaken if for one minute they supposed he was afraid. But they had not gone fifty yards before he begged to be put down. He said it was absolutely necessary that he should go back to the village and collect the wounded there and have them ready for the ambulance on its return.

They let him go. Charlotte looked round the corner of the hood and saw him running with brief, jerky strides.

"He's got a nerve," said John, "to be able to do it."

"What excuse do you think he'll make?"

"Oh, he'll say we sent him."

The straight dyke of the road went on and on. Seen from the sunk German lines the heavy ambulance car would look like a house on wheels running along a wall. She thought again of John on his exposed seat. If only he had let her drive—But that was absurd. Of course he wouldn't let her. If you were to keep on thinking of the things that might happen to John—Meanwhile nothing could take from them the delight of this dangerous run across the open. She had to remind herself that the adventure, the romance of it was not what mattered most; it was not the real thing, the thing they had gone out for.

When they came to the wounded, when they came to the wounded, then it would begin.

The hamlet began to show now; it sat on one side of the road, low and alone in the flat land, an open field in front of it, and at the bottom of the field the river and a line of willows, and behind the willows the Germans, hidden. White smoke curled among the branches. You could see it was an outpost, one of the points at which the Germans, if they broke through, would come into the village. They supposed that the house where the wounded men were would be the last of the short row.

Here on their right there were no houses, only the long, high flank of a barn. The parts that had been built out into the field were shelled away, but the outer wall by the roadside still held. It was all that stood between them and the German guns. They drew up the car under its shelter and got down.

They could see all the houses of the hamlet at once on their left; whitewashed walls; slender grey doors and shutters. The three that looked out on to the barn were untouched. A few yards ahead a small, empty wine-shop faced the open field; its doorstep and the path in front of its windows glittered with glass dust, with spikes and splinters, and heaped shale of glass that slid and cracked under your feet. Beyond it, a house with its door and all its windows and the front slope of its roof blown in. A broken shutter sagged from the wall. Then the shell of the last house; it pricked up one plastered gable, white and hard against the blue.

They found the men in the last house but one, the house with the broken shutter. They went, carrying their stretchers and the haversack of dressings, under the slanted lintel into the room. The air in there was hot and stifling and thickened with a grey powdery swarm. Their feet sank through a layer of pinkish, greyish dust.

The three wounded men lay stretched out on this floor, among brickbats and broken panes and slabs of dropped plaster. A thin grey powder had settled on them all. And by the side of each man the dust was stiffened into a red cake with a glairy pool in the middle of it, fed from the raw wound; and where two men lay together their pools had joined and overflowed in a thin red stream.

John put down his stretcher and stood still. His face was very white, and his upper lip showed in-drawn and dry, and tightened as though it were glued to his teeth.

"John, you aren't going to faint or be sick or anything?"

"I'm all right."

He went forward, clenching his fists; moving in a curious drawn way, like a sleep walker.

They were kneeling in the dust now, looking for the wounds.

"We must do this chap with the arm first. He'll want a tourniquet."

He spoke in a husky whisper as if he were half asleep....

The wounded head stuck to the floor. They scraped round it, digging with their hands; it came up wearing a crust of powdered lime. A pad and a bandage. They couldn't do anything more for that ... The third man, with the fractured shin-bone and the big flesh-wound in his thigh, must have splints and a dressing.

She wondered how John would set about his work. But his queer, hypnotised actions were effectual and clean.

Between them they had fixed the tourniquet.

Through all her preoccupation and the quick, dexterous movement of her hands she could feel her pity tightening her throat: pity that hurt like love, that was delicious and exquisite like love. Nothing mattered, nothing existed in her mind but the three wounded men. John didn't matter. John didn't exist. He was nothing but a pair of hands working quickly and dexterously with her own.... She looked up. John's mouth kept its hard, glued look; his eyes were feverish behind a glaze of water, and red-rimmed.

She thought: It's awful for him. He minds too much. It hurt her to see how he minded. After all, he did matter. Deep inside her he mattered more than the wounded men; he mattered more than anything on earth. Only there wasn't time, there wasn't time to think of him.

She turned to the next man and caught sight of the two machine guns with their tilted muzzles standing in the corner of the room by the chimney. They must remember to bring away the guns.

John's hypnotic whisper came again. "You might get those splints, Charlotte."

As she crossed the road a shell fell in the open field beyond, and burst, throwing up a great splash and spray of brown earth. She stiffened herself in an abrupt gesture of defiance. Her mind retorted: "You've missed, that time. You needn't think I'm going to put myself out for you." To show that she wasn't putting herself out (in case they should be looking) she strolled with dignity to her car, selected carefully the kind of splint she needed, and returned. She thought: Oh well—supposing they do hit. We must get those men out before another comes.

John looked up as she came to him. His face glistened with pinheads of sweat; he panted in the choking air.

"Where did that shell burst?"

"Miles away."

"Are you certain?"

"Rather."

She lied. Why not? John had been lying all the time. Lying was part of their defiance, a denial that the enemy's effort had succeeded. Nothing mattered but the fixing of the splints and the carrying of the men....

John was cranking up the engine when she turned back into the house.

"I say, what are you doing?"

"Going for the guns."

There was, she noticed, a certain longish interval between shells. John and the wounded men would be safe from shrapnel under the shelter of the wall. She brought out the first gun and stowed it at the back of the car. Then she went in for the other. It stood on the seat between them with its muzzle pointing down the road. Charlotte put her arm round it to steady it.

On the way back to the dressing-station she sat silent, thinking of the three wounded men in there, behind, rocked and shaken by the jolting of the car on the uneven causeway. John was silent, too, absorbed by his steering.

But as they ran into Ghent the romance of it, the romance of it, came back to her. It wasn't over yet. They would have to go out again for the wounded they had had to leave behind at Berlaere.

"John—John—It's like nothing else on earth."

"I told you it would be."

Slowly realization came to her. They had brought in their wounded under the enemy's fire. And they had saved the guns.

* * * * *

"Do you mind," John said, "if Sutton goes instead of me He hasn't been out yet?"

"N-no. Not if I can go too."

"Do you want to?"

"Awfully."

She had drawn up the ambulance in the Square before the Hospital and sat in her driver's seat, waiting. Sutton came to her there. When he saw her he stood still.

"You going?"

"Rather. Do you mind?"

Sutton didn't answer. All the way out to Berlaere he sat stolid and silent, not looking at anything they passed and taking no more notice of the firing than if he hadn't heard it. As the car swung into Berlaere she was aware of his voice, low under the noise of the engine.

"What did you say?"

"Conway told me it was you who saved the guns."

Suddenly she was humbled.

"It was the men who saved them. We just brought them away."

"Conway told me what you did," he said quietly.

Going out with Sutton was a quiet affair.

"You know," he said presently, "it was against the Hague Convention."

"Good heavens, so it was! I never thought of it."

"You must think of it. You gave the Germans the right to fire on all our ambulances.... You see, this isn't just a romantic adventure; it's a disagreeable, necessary, rather dangerous job."

"I didn't do it for swank. I knew the guns were wanted, and I couldn't bear to leave them."

"I know, it would have been splendid if you'd been a combatant. But," he said sadly, "this is a field ambulance, not an armoured car."



IX

She was glad they had been sent out with the McClane Corps to Melle. She wanted McClane to see the stuff that John was made of. She knew what had been going on in the commandant's mind. He had been trying to persuade himself that John was no good, because, from the minute he had seen him with his ambulance on the wharf at Ostend, from the minute he had known his destination, he had been jealous of him and afraid. Why, he must have raced them all the way from Ostend, to get in first. Afraid and jealous, afraid of John's youth with its secret of triumph and of courage; jealous of John's face and body that men and women turned back to look at as they passed; even the soldiers going up to the battlefields, going up to wounds and death, turned to look at this creature of superb and brilliant life. Even on the boat he must have had a dreadful wonder whether John was bound for Ghent; he must have known from the beginning that wherever Conway placed himself he would stand out and make other men look small and insignificant. If he wasn't jealous and afraid of Sutton she supposed it was because John had had that rather diminishing effect on poor Billy.

If Billy Sutton distinguished himself that would open McClane's eyes a little wider, too.

She wondered why Billy kept on saying that McClane was a great psychologist. If it was true that would be very awful for McClane; he would see everything going on inside people, then, all the things he didn't want to see; he wouldn't miss anything, and he would know all the time what John was like. The little man was wilfully shutting his eyes because he was so mean that he couldn't bear to see John as he really was. Now he would have to see.

The thought of McClane's illumination consoled her for her own inferior place in the adventure. This time the chauffeurs would have to stay at the end of the village with their cars. The three were drawn up at the street side, close under the house walls, McClane's first. Then Sutton's, with Gwinnie. Then hers; behind it the short straight road where the firing would come down.

John stood in the roadway waiting for the others. He had his hand beside her hand, grasping the arm of the driver's seat.

"I wish you could take me with you," she said.

"Can't. The orders are, all chauffeurs to stand by the cars."

... His eyebrows knotted and twitched in sudden anxiety.

"You know, Sharlie, you'll be fired on."

"I know. I don't mind, John, I don't really. I shall be all right."

"Yes. You'll be all right." But by the way he kept on glancing up and down the road she could see he was uneasy. "If you could have stood in front of those cars. You're in the most dangerous place here."

"Somebody's got to be in it."

He looked at her and smiled. "Jeanne," he said, "in her armour."

"Rot."

And they were silent.

"I say, John—my car does cover Gwinnie's a bit, doesn't it?"

"Yes," he said abruptly.

"That's all right. You must go now. They're coming for the stretchers."

His face quivered. He thrust out his hand quickly, and as she took it she thought: He thinks he isn't coming back. She was aware of Mrs. Rankin and two of the McClane men with stretchers, passing; she could see Mrs. Rankin looking at them as she came on, smiling over her shoulder, drawing the men's attention to their leave-taking.

She thought: They don't shake hands when they're going out. They don't think whether they're coming back or not.... They don't think at all. But then, none of them were lovers as she and John were lovers.

"John, you'd better go and carry Mrs. Rankin's stretcher for her."

He went.

She watched them as they walked together up the short straight road to the battlefield at the top. Sutton followed with Alice Bartrum; then the McClane men; they nodded to her and smiled. Then McClane, late, running, trying to overtake John and Mrs. Rankin, to get to the head of his unit. Perhaps he was afraid that John, in his khaki, would be mistaken for the commandant.

How childish he was with his fear and jealousy. Childish. She thought of his petulant refusal to let John come in with them. As if he could really keep him out. When it came to action they were one corps; they couldn't very well be divided, since McClane had more men than stretchers and John had more stretchers than men. They would all be infinitely happier, working together like that, instead of standing stupidly apart, glaring and hating.

Yet she knew what McClane and Mrs. Rankin had been playing for. McClane, if he could, would have taken their fine Roden cars from them; he would have taken Sutton. She knew that Mrs. Rankin would have taken John from her, Charlotte Redhead, if she could.

And when she thought of the beautiful, arrogant woman, marching up to the battlefield with John, she wondered whether, after all, she didn't hate her.... No. No. It was horrible to hate a woman who at any minute might be killed. They said McClane didn't look after his women. He didn't care how they exposed themselves to the firing; he took them into unnecessary danger. He didn't care. He was utterly cold, utterly indifferent to everybody and everything except his work of getting in the wounded.... Well, perhaps, if he had been decent to John, she wouldn't have believed a word of it, and anyhow they hadn't come out there to be protected.

She had a vision of John and McClane carrying Mrs. Rankin between them on a stretcher. That was what would happen if you hated. Hate could kill.

Then John and she were safe. They were lovers. Lovers. Neither of them had ever said a word, but they owned the wonderful, immaterial fact in secret to each other; the thought of it moved in secret behind all their other thoughts. From the moment, just passed, when they held each other's hands she knew that John loved her, not in a dream, not in coldness, but with a queer unearthly ardour. He had her in his incredible, immaterial way, a way that none of them would understand.

From the Barrow Hill Farm time? Or from yesterday? She didn't know. Perhaps it had gone on all the time; but it would be only since yesterday that he really knew it.

A line of soldiers marched by, going up to the battlefield. They looked at her and smiled, a flashing of bright eyes and teeth all down the line. When they had passed the street was deserted.

... That rattle on the stones was the firing. It had come at last. She saw Gwinnie looking back round the corner of the hood to see what it was like. She called to her, "Don't stick your head out, you silly cuckoo. You'll be hit." She said to herself, If I think about it I shall feel quite jumpy. It was one thing to go tearing along between two booming batteries, in excitement, with an end in view, and quite another thing to sit tight and still on a motionless car, to be fired on. A bit trying to the nerves, she thought, if it went on long. She was glad that her car stood next to the line of fire, sheltering Gwinnie's, and she wondered how John was getting on up there.

The hands of the ambulance clock pointed to half-past three. They had been waiting forty minutes, then. She got down to see if any of the stretcher bearers were in sight.

* * * * *

They were coming back. Straggling, lurching forms. White bandages. The wounded who could walk came first. Then the stretchers.

Alice Bartrum stopped as she passed Charlotte. The red had gone from her sunburn, but her face was undisturbed.

"You've got to wait here," she said, "for Mr. Conway and Sutty. And Trixie and Mac. They mayn't be back for ages. They've gone miles up the field."

She waited.

The front cars had been loaded, had driven off and returned three times. It was six o'clock before John appeared with Mrs. Rankin.

She heard Mrs. Rankin calling sharply to her to get down and give a hand with the stretcher.

John and Mrs. Rankin were disputing.

"Can't you shove it in at the bottom?" he was saying.

"No. The first cases must go on top."

Her mouth snapped like a clamp. Her eyes were blazing. She was struggling with the head of the stretcher while John heaved at the foot. He staggered as he moved, and his face was sallow-white and drawn and glistening. When Charlotte took the shafts from him they were slippery with his sweat.

"Is he hurt?" she whispered.

"Very badly hurt," said Mrs. Rankin.

"John, I mean."

Mrs. Rankin snorted. "You'd better ask him."

John was slouching round to the front of the car, anxious to get out of the sight and sound of her. He went with an uneven dropping movement of one hip. Charlotte followed him.

"Get into your seat, Sharlie. We've got to wait for Billy and McClane."

He dragged himself awkwardly into the place beside her.

"John," she said, "are you hurt?"

"No. But I think I've strained something. That's why I couldn't lift that damned stretcher."

* * * * *

The windows stood wide open to the sweet, sharp air. She heard Mrs. Rankin and Sutton talking on the balcony. In that dreadful messroom you heard everything.

"What do you suppose it was then?" Mrs. Rankin said.

And Sutton, "Oh, I don't know. Something upset him."

"If he's going to be upset like that every time he'd better go home."

They were talking—she knew they were talking about John.

"Hallo, Charlotte, we haven't left you much tea."

"It doesn't matter."

Her hunger left her suddenly. She stared with disgust at the remains of the tea the McClane Corps had eaten.

Sutton went on. "He hasn't been sleeping properly. I've made him go to bed."

"If you can keep him in bed for the duration of the war—"

"Are you talking about John?"

"We are."

"I don't know what you're driving at; but I suppose he was sick on that beastly battlefield. It's all very well for you two; you're a trained nurse and Billy's a surgeon.... You aren't taken that way when you see blood."

"Blood?" said Mrs. Rankin.

"Yes. Blood. He was perfectly all right yesterday."

Mrs. Rankin laughed. "Yesterday he couldn't see there was any danger. You could tell that by the idiotic things he said."

"I saw it. And if I could he could."

"Funny kid. You'd better get on with your tea. You'll be sent out again before you know where you are."

Charlotte settled down. Sutton was standing beside her now, cutting bread and butter.

"Hold on," he said. "That tea's all stewed and cold. I'll make you some of mine."

She drank the hot, fragrant China tea he brought her.

Presently she stood up. "I think I'll take John some of this."

"Best thing you can give him," Sutton said. He got up and opened the doors for her, the glass doors and the door of the bedroom.

She sat down beside John's bed and watched him while he drank Sutton's tea. He said he was all right now. No. He hadn't ruptured anything; he only thought he had; but Sutton had overhauled him and said he was all right.

And all the time his face was still vexed and drawn. Something must have happened out there; something that hurt him to think of.

"John," she said, "I wish I'd gone with you instead of Mrs. Rankin."

"I wish to God you had. Everything's all right when you're with me, and everything's all wrong when you're not."

"How do you mean, wrong?"

He shook his head, frowning slightly, as a sign for her to stop. Sutton had come into the room.

"You needn't go," he said, "I've only come for my coat and my case. I've got to help with the operations."

He slipped into the white linen coat. There were thin smears of blood on the sleeves and breast. He groped about the room, peering short-sightedly for his case of instruments.

"John, was Mrs. Rankin any good?" she asked presently.

John lay back and closed his eyes as if to shut out the sight of Mrs. Rankin.

"Don't talk to me," he said, "about that horrible woman."

Sutton had turned abruptly from his search.

"Good?" he said. "She was magnificent. So was Miss Bartrum. So was McClane."

John opened his eyes. "So was Charlotte."

"I quite agree with you." Sutton had found his case. His face was hidden by the raised lid as he peered, examining his instruments. He spoke abstractly. "Magnificent."

When he left the room Charlotte followed him.

"Billy—"

"Well—"

He stopped in his noiseless course down the corridor.

"What was it?" she said. "What happened?"

He didn't pretend not to understand her.

"Oh, nothing. Conway and Mrs. Rankin didn't hit it off very well together."

They spoke in low, rapid tones, conscious, always, of the wards behind the shut doors. Her feet went fast and noiseless beside his as he hurried to the operating theatre. They came out on to the wide landing and waited there by the brass lattice of the lift.

"How do you mean, hit it off?"

"Oh well, she thought he didn't come up quick enough with a stretcher, and she pitched into him."

"But he was dead beat. Done. Couldn't she see that?"

"No. I don't suppose she could. She was a bit excited."

"She was horrible." Now that Mrs. Rankin was back safe she hated her. She knew she hated her.

"A bit cruel, perhaps. All the same," he said, "she was magnif—"

The lift had come hissing and wailing up behind him. The orderly stood in it, staring at Sutton's back, obsequious, yet impatient. She thought of the wounded men in the theatre downstairs.

"You mustn't keep them waiting," she said.

He stepped back into the lift. It lowered him rapidly. His chin was on a level with the floor when his mouth tried again and succeeded: "Magnificent."

And she knew that she had followed him out to near him say that John had been magnificent, too.

Gwinnie was looking in at the messroom door and saying "Do you know where Charlotte is?" Mrs. Rankin's voice called out, "I think you'll find her in Mr. Conway's bedroom." One of the chauffeurs laughed. Charlotte knew what they were thinking.

Gwinnie failed to retort. She was excited, shaken out of her stolidity.

"Oh, there you are! I've got something ripping to tell you. Not in here."

They slouched, with their arms slung affectionately round each other's waists, into their own room. Behind the shut door Gwinnie began.

"The Colonel's most frightfully pleased about Berlaere."

"Does he think they'll hold it?"

"It isn't that. He's pleased about you."

"Me?"

"You and John. What you did there. And your bringing back the guns."

"Who told you that?"

"Mac. The old boy was going on to him like anything about you last night. It means you'll be sent out every time. Every time there's anything big on."

"Oh-h! Let's go and tell John.... I suppose," she added, "that's what was the matter with Mrs. Rankin."

She wondered whether it had been the matter with Billy Sutton too; if he too were jealous and afraid.

That night Mrs. Rankin told her what the Colonel really had said: "'C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas—la Croix Rouge.' If you're all sent home to-morrow it'll serve you jolly well right," she said.

But somehow she couldn't make it sound as if he had been angry.



X

She waited.

John had told her to stay there with the wounded man up the turn of the stable yard while he went for the stretcher. His car, packed with wounded, stood a little way up the street, headed for Ghent. Sutton's car, with one of McClane's chauffeurs, was in front of it, ready; she could hear the engine purring.

Instead of going at once for the stretcher John had followed Sutton into the house opposite, the house with the narrow grey shutters. And he had called to her again across the road to wait for him.

Behind her in the yard the wounded man sat on the cobblestones, his back propped against the stable wall. He was safe there, safer than he would have been outside in the ambulance.

It was awful to think that he would have been left behind if they had not found him at the last minute among the straw.

She went and stood by the yard entrance to see whether John were coming with the stretcher. A soldier came out of the house with the narrow shutters, wounded, limping, his foot bound to a splint. Then Sutton came, hurrying to help him. He shouted to her, "Come on, Charlotte, hurry up!" and she called back, "I've got to wait here for John."

She watched them go on slowly up the road to Sutton's car; she saw them get in; she saw the car draw out and rush away.

Then she saw John come out of the door of the house and stand there, looking up and down the street. Once she saw him glance back over his shoulder at something behind him in the room. The same instant she heard the explosion and saw the shell burst in the middle of the street, not fifty yards from the ambulance. Half a minute after she saw John dash from the doorway and run, run at an incredible pace, towards his car. She heard him crank up the engine.

She supposed that he was going to back towards the yard, and she wondered whether she could lift up the Belgian and carry him out. She stooped over him, put her hands under his armpits, raising him and wondering. Better not. He had a bad wound. Better wait for the stretcher.

She turned, suddenly, arrested. The noise she heard was not the grating noise of a car backing, it was the scream of a car getting away; it dropped to a heavy whirr and diminished.

She looked out. Up the road she saw John's car rushing furiously towards Ghent.

The Belgian had heard it. His eyes moved. Black hare's eyes, terrified. It was not possible, he said, that they had been left behind?

No, it was not possible. John had forgotten them; but he would remember; he would come back. In five minutes. Seven minutes. She had waited fifteen.

The Belgian was muttering something. He complained of being left there. He said he was not anxious about himself, but about Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle ought not to have been left. She was sitting on the ground now, beside him.

"It'll be all right," she said. "He'll come back." When he remembered he would come back.

She had waited half an hour.

Another shell. It had burst over there at the backs of the houses, beyond the stable.

She wondered whether it would be safer to drag her man across the street under the wall of the Town Hall. They would be sure to aim at it and miss it, whereas any minute they might hit the stable.

At the moment while she wondered there was a third tremendous explosion, the crash and roar of brickwork falling like coal down an enormous chute. It came from the other side of the street a little way down. It couldn't be far from the Town Hall. That settled it. Much better stay where they were. The Belgian had put his arm round her, drawing her to him, away from the noise and shock of the shell.

It was clear now that John was not coming back. He had forgotten them.

The Belgian's hold slackened; he dozed, falling against her and recovering himself with a jerk and begging her pardon. She drew down his head on to her shoulder and let it rest there. Her mind was soaked in the smell of his rank breath, of the warm sweat that oozed through his tunic, the hot, fetid smell that came through his unlaced boots. She didn't care; she was too sorry for him. She could feel nothing but the helpless pressure of his body against hers, nothing but her pity that hurt her and was exquisite like love. Yesterday she had thought it would be good to die with John. Now she thought it would be good to die with the wounded Belgian, since John had left her there to die.

And again, she had a vehement desire for life, a horror of the unjust death John was bringing on them.

But of course there wouldn't be any death. If nobody came she would walk back to Ghent and bring out the ambulance.

If only he had shouted to her to carry the wounded man and come. In the minute between the concussion of the shell and the cranking of the engine. But she could see him rushing. If only she knew why he had left them.... She wanted to get back to Ghent, to see John, to know. To know if John—if John really was—Nothing could be worse than not knowing.

It didn't matter so much his forgetting her. The awful thing was his forgetting the wounded man. How could you forget a wounded man? When she remembered the Belgian's terrified hare's eyes she hated John.

And, as she sat there supporting his head with her shoulder, she thought again. There must have been a wounded man in the house John had come out of. Was it possible that he had forgotten him, too?... He hadn't forgotten. She could see him looking back over his shoulder; looking at something that was lying there, that couldn't be anything but a wounded man. Or a dead man. Whatever it was, it had been the last thing he had seen; the last thing he had thought of before he made his dash. It wasn't possible that he had left a wounded man in there, alive. It was not possible.

And all the time while she kept on telling herself that it was not possible she saw a wounded man in the room John had left; she saw his head turning to the doorway, and his eyes, frightened; she felt his anguish in the moment that he knew himself abandoned. Not forgotten. Abandoned.

She would have to go over to the house and see. She must know whether the man was there or not there. She raised the Belgian's head, gently, from her shoulder. She would have to wake him and tell him what she was going to do, so that he mightn't think she had left him and be frightened.

But the Belgian roused himself to a sudden virile determination. Mademoiselle must not cross the road. It was too dangerous. Mademoiselle would be hit. He played on her pity with an innocent, cunning cajolery. "Mademoiselle must not leave me. I do not want to be left."

"Only for one minute. One little minute. I think there's a wounded man, like you, Monsieur, in that house."

"Ah—h—A wounded man?" He seemed to acknowledge the integrity of her purpose. "If only I were not wounded, if only I could crawl an inch, I would go instead of Mademoiselle."

* * * * *

The wounded man lay on the floor of the room in his corner by the fireplace where John had left him. His coat was rolled up under his head for a pillow. He lay on his side, with humped hips and knees drawn up, and one hand, half clenched, half relaxed, on his breast under the drooped chin; so that at first she thought he was alive, sleeping. She knelt down beside him and clasped his wrist; she unbuttoned his tunic and put in her hand under his shirt above the point of his heart. He was certainly dead. No pulse; no beat; no sign of breathing. Yet his body was warm still, and limp as if with sleep. He couldn't have been dead very long.

And he was young. A boy. Not more than sixteen. John couldn't have left him.

She wasn't certain. She was no nearer certainty so long as she didn't know when the boy had died. If only she knew—

They hadn't unfastened his tunic and shirt to feel over his heart if he were dead. So he couldn't have been dead when they left him.... But there was Sutton. Billy wouldn't have left him unless he had been dead. Her mind worked rapidly, jumping from point to point, trying to find some endurable resting place.... He was so young, so small, so light. Light. It wouldn't take two to carry him. She could have picked him up and carried him herself. Billy had had the lame man to look after. He had left the boy to John. She saw John looking back over his shoulder.

She got up and went through the house, through all the rooms, to see if there were any more of them that John had left there. She felt tired out and weak, sick with her belief, her fear of what John had done. The dead boy was alone in the house. She covered his face with her handkerchief and went back.

The Belgian waited for her at the entrance to the yard. He had dragged himself there, crawling on his hands and knees. He smiled when he saw her.

"I was coming to look for you, Mademoiselle."

She had him safe beside her against the stable wall. He let his head rest on her shoulder now, glad of the protecting contact. She tried not to think about John. Something closed down between them. Black. Black; shutting him off, closing her heart against him, leaving her heart hard and sick. The light went slowly out of the street, out of the sky. The dark came, the dark sounding with the "Boom—Boom" of the guns, lit with spiked diamond flashes like falling stars.

The Belgian had gone to sleep again when she heard the ambulance coming down the street.

* * * * *

"Is that you, Charlotte?"

"Billy—! What made you come?"

"Conway. He's in a frantic funk. Said he'd lost you. He thought you'd gone on with me."

How awful it would be if Billy knew.

"It was my fault," she lied. "He told me to go on with you." She could hear him telling her to wait for him in the stable yard.

"I'd have come before only I didn't see him soon enough. I had an operation.... Is that a wounded man you've got there? I suppose he lost him, too?"

"He didn't know he was here."

"I see."

Then she remembered. Billy would know. Billy would tell her.

"Billy—was that boy dead when you left him! The boy in the house over there."

He was stooping to the Belgian, examining his bandages, and he didn't answer all at once. He seemed to be meditating.

"Was he?" she repeated.

It struck her that Billy was surprised.

"Because—" She stopped there. She couldn't say to him, "I want to know whether John left him dead or alive."

"He was dead all right." Sutton's voice came up slow and muffled out of his meditation.

It was all right. She might have known. She might have known. Vaguely for a moment she wondered why Billy had come for her and not John; then she was frightened.

"Billy—John isn't hurt, is he?"

"No. Rather not. A bit done up. I made him go and lie down.... Look here, we must get out of this."

* * * * *

The McClane Corps were gathered on their side of the messroom. They greeted her with shouts of joy, but their eyes looked at her queerly, as if they knew something dreadful had happened to her.

"You should have stood in with us, Charlotte," Mrs. Rankin was saying. "Then you wouldn't get mislaid among the shells." She was whispering. "Dr. McClane, if you took Charlotte out among the shells, would you run away and leave her there?"

"I'd try not to."

Oh yes. He wouldn't run away and leave her. But he wouldn't care where he took her. He wouldn't care whether a shell got her or not. But John cared. If only she knew why.... Their queer faces sobered her and suddenly she knew. She saw Sutton coming out of the house with the narrow shutters; she heard him shouting to her, "Come on, Charlotte, hurry up!"

John must have heard him. He must really have thought that she had gone with him.

But he must have known, too, that she wouldn't go. He must have known that if he told her to wait for him she would wait. So that—

The voices of the McClane women ceased abruptly. One of them turned round. Charlotte saw John standing between the glasses of the two doors. He came in and she heard Mrs. Rankin calling out in her hard, insolent voice, "Well, Mr. Conway, so you've got in safe."

She was always like that, hard and insolent, with her damned courage. As if courage were ever anything more than just being decent, and as if other people couldn't be decent too. She hated John because she couldn't make him come to her, couldn't make him look with pleasure at her beautiful, arrogant face. She disliked Sutton and McClane for the same reason, but she hated John. He treated her face with a hardness and insolence like her own. You could see her waiting for her revenge, watching every minute for a chance to stick her blade into him. He was pretending that he hadn't heard her.

His hair stood up in pointed tufts, rumpled from his pillow. His eyes had a dazed, stupid look as if he were not perfectly awake. But at the sound of the rasping voice his mouth had tightened; it was pinched and sharp with pain. He didn't look at Mrs. Rankin. He came to her, Charlotte Redhead, straight; straight as if she had drawn him from his sleep.

The McClane people got up, one after another, and went out.

"Charlotte," he said, "did you really think I'd left you?"

"I thought you'd left me. But I knew you hadn't."

"You knew it wasn't possible?"

"Yes. Inside me I knew."

"I'm awfully sorry. Sutton told me you were going on with him, and I thought you'd gone."



XI

She would remember for ever the talk they had on the balcony that day while Antwerp was falling.

They were standing there, she and John Conway and Sutton, looking over the station and the railway lines to the open country beyond: the fields, the tall slender trees, the low mounds of the little hills, bristling and dark. Round the corner of the balcony they could see into the Place below; it was filled with a thick black crowd of refugees. Antwerp was falling. Presently the ambulance train would come in and they would have to go over there to the station with their stretchers and carry out the wounded. Meanwhile they waited.

John brooded. His face was heavy and sombre with discontent. "No," he said. "No. It isn't good enough."

"What isn't?"

"What we're doing here. Going to all those little tin-pot places. The real fighting isn't down there. They ought to send us to Antwerp."

"I suppose they send us where they think we're most wanted."

"I don't believe they do. We were fools not to have insisted on going to Antwerp, instead of letting ourselves be stuck here in a rotten side show."

"We've had enough to do, anyhow," said Sutton.

"And there isn't anybody but us and Mac to do it," Charlotte said.

John's eyebrows twisted. "Yes; but we're not in it. I want to be in it. In the big thing; the big dangerous thing."

Sutton sighed and got up and left them. John waited for the closing of the door.

"Does it strike you," he said, "that Billy isn't very keen?"

"No. It doesn't. What do you mean?"

"I notice that he's jolly glad when he can get an indoor job."

"That's because they're short of surgeons. He only wants to do what's most useful."

"I didn't say he had cold feet."

"Of course he hasn't. Billy would go to Antwerp like a shot if they'd let him. He feels just as we do about it. That's why he got up and went away."

"He'd go. But he wouldn't enjoy it."

"Oh, don't talk about 'enjoying.'"

"Sharlie, you don't mean to say that you're not keen?"

"No. It's only that I don't care as much as I did about what you call the romance of it; and I do care more about the solid work. It seems to me that it doesn't matter who does it so long as it's done."

"I'd very much rather I did it than McClane. So would you."

"Yes. I would. But I'd be sorry if poor little Mac didn't get any of it. And all the time I know it doesn't matter which of us it is. It doesn't matter whether we're in danger or out of danger, or whether we're in the big thing or a little one."

"Don't you want to be in the big thing?"

"Yes. I want. But I know my wanting doesn't matter. I don't matter. None of us matters."

That was how she felt about it now that it had come to defeat, now that Antwerp was falling. Yesterday they, she and John, had been vivid entities, intensely real, living and moving in the war as in a containing space that was real enough, since it was there, but real like hell or heaven or God, not to be grasped or felt in its reality; only the stretch of it that they covered was real, the roads round Ghent, the burning villages, the places where they served, Berlaere and Melle, Quatrecht and Zele; the wounded men. Yesterday her thoughts about John had mattered, her doubt and fear of him and her pain; her agony of desire that he should be, should be always, what she loved him for being; and her final certainty had been the one important, the one real thing. To-day she had difficulty in remembering all that, as if they hadn't really been. To-day they were unimportant to themselves and to each other; small, not quite real existences, enveloped by an immense reality that closed in on them; alive; black, palpitating defeat. It made nothing of them, of their bodies nothing but the parts they worked with: feet and hands. Nothing mattered, nothing existed but the war, and the armies, the Belgian army, beaten.

Antwerp was falling. And afterwards it would be Ghent, and then Ostend. And then there would be no more Belgium.

But John wouldn't hear of it. Ghent wouldn't fall.

"It won't fall because it isn't a fortified city," she objected. "But it'll surrender. It'll have to."

"It won't. If the Germans come anywhere near we shall drive them back."

"They are near. They're all round in a ring with only a little narrow opening up there. And the ring's getting closer."

"It's easier to push back a narrow ring than a wide one."

"It's easier to break through a thin ring than a thick one, and who's going to push?"

"We are. The British. We'll come pouring in, hundreds of thousands of us, through that little narrow opening up there."

"If we only would—"

"Of course we shall. If I thought we wouldn't, if I thought we were going to let the Belgians down, if we betrayed them—My God! I'd kill myself.... No. No, I wouldn't. That wouldn't hurt enough. I'd give up my damned country and be a naturalized Belgian. Why, they trust us. They trust us to save Antwerp."

"If we don't, that wouldn't be betrayal."

"It would. The worst kind. It would be like betraying a wounded man; or a woman. Like me betraying you, Jeanne. You needn't look like that. It's so bad that it can't happen."

Through the enveloping sadness she felt a prick of joy, seeing him so valiant, so unbeaten in his soul. It supported her certainty. His soul was so big that nothing could satisfy it but the big thing, the big dangerous thing. He wouldn't even believe that Antwerp was falling.

* * * * *

She knew. She knew. There was not the smallest doubt about it any more. She saw it happen.

It happened in the village near Lokeren, the village whose name she couldn't remember. The Germans had taken Lokeren that morning; they were in Lokeren. At any minute they might be in the village.

You had to pass through a little town to get to it. And there they had been told that they must not go on. And they had gone on. And in the village they were told that they must go back and they had not gone back. They had been given five minutes to get in their wounded and they had been there three-quarters of an hour, she and John working together, and Trixie Rankin with McClane and two of his men.

Charlotte had been sorry for Sutton and Gwinnie and the rest of McClane's corps who had not come out with them to this new place, but had been sent back again to Melle where things had been so quiet all morning that they hadn't filled their ambulances, and half of them had hung about doing nothing. She had fretted at the stupidity which had sent them where they were not wanted. But here there were not enough hands for the stretchers, and Charlotte was wanted every second of the time. From the first minute you could see what you were in for.

The retreat.

And for an instant, in the blind rush and confusion of it, she had lost sight of John. She had turned the car round and left it with its nose pointing towards Ghent. Trixie Rankin and the McClane men were at the front cars taking out the stretchers; John and McClane were going up the road. She had got out her own stretcher and was following them when the battery came tearing down the road and cut them off. It tore headlong, swerving and careening with great rattling and crashing noises. She could see the faces of the men, thrown back, swaying; there was no terror in them, only a sort of sullen anger and resentment.

She stood on the narrow sandy track beside the causeway to let it pass, and when a gap came in the train she dashed through to get to John. And John was not there. When all the artillery had passed he was not there; only McClane, going on up the middle of the street by himself.

She ran after him and asked him what had happened to John. He turned, dreamy and deliberate, utterly unperturbed. John, he said, had gone on to look for a wounded man who was said to have been taken into one of those houses there, on the right, in the lane. She went down the lane with her stretcher and McClane waited for them at the top. The doors of the houses were open; Flemish women stood outside, looking up to the street. There was one house with a shut door, a tall green door; she thought that would be the one that John had gone into. She rapped and he opened the door and came striding out, holding his head high. He shut the door quietly and looked at her, an odd look, piercing and grave.

"Dead," he said.

And when McClane met them he said it again, "Dead."

The wounded were being brought down from Lokeren in trams that ran on to a siding behind a little fir plantation outside the village. At the wide top of the street a table of boards and trestles stood by the foot track, and the stretchers were laid on it as they came in, and the wounded had their first bandaging and dressings there. McClane took up his place by this table, and the stretcher bearers went backwards and forwards between the village and the plantation.

Beyond the plantation the flagged road stretched flat and grey, then bent in a deep curve, and on the wider sweep of the curve a row of tall, slender trees stood up like a screen.

It would be round the turn of the road under the trees that the Germans would come when they came. You couldn't lose this sense of them, coming on behind there, not yet seen, but behind, coming on, pursuing the retreat of the batteries. Every now and then they found themselves looking up towards the turn. The grey, bending sweep and the screen of tall trees had a fascination for them, a glamour; and above the movements of their hands and feet their minds watched, intent, excited, but without fear. There was no fear in the village. The women came out of their houses carrying cups of water for the men's thirst; they seemed to be concerned, not with the coming of the Germans, but with the bringing in of the wounded and the presence of the English ambulance in their street.

And the four stretcher bearers came and went, from house to house and between the village and the plantation, working, working steadily. Yet they were aware, all the time, of the pursuing terror, behind the turn of the road; they were held still in their intentness. Over all of them was a quiet, fixed serenity. McClane's body had lost its eager, bustling energy and was still; his face was grave, preoccupied and still; only Trixie Rankin went rushing, and calling out to her quiet man in a fierce, dominating excitement.

And in John's face and in his alert body there was happiness, happiness that was almost ecstasy; it ran through and shone from him, firm and still, like a flame that couldn't go out. It penetrated her and made her happy and satisfied and sure of him. She had seen it leap up in him as he swung himself into the seat beside her when they started. He was restless, restless every day until they were sent out; he couldn't wait in peace before they had set off on the adventure, as if he were afraid that at the last minute something would happen to dash his chance from him. She couldn't find this passionate uneasiness in herself; she waited with a stolid trust in the event; but she had something of his feeling. After all, it was there, the romance, the fascination, the glamour; you couldn't deny it any more than you could deny the beating of the blood in your veins. It was their life.

They had been in the village three quarters of an hour. John and Charlotte waited while McClane at his table was putting the last bandage on the last wound. In another minute they would be gone. It was then that the Belgian Red Cross man came running to them. Had they taken a man with a wound in his back? A bad wound? As big as that? No? Then he was still here, and he had got to take him to the ambulance. No, he didn't know where he was. He might be in one of those houses where they took in the wounded, or he might be up there by the tramway in the plantation. Would they take a stretcher and find him? He had to go back to the tramway. The last tram was coming in from Lokeren. He ran back, fussy and a little frightened.

John shouted out, "Hold on, McClane, there's another tram coming," and set off up the street. They had taken all the men out of the houses; therefore the man with the bad wound must have been left somewhere by the plantation. They went there, carrying their stretcher, going, going up to the last minute, in delight, in the undying thrill of the danger.

The wounded man was not in the plantation. As they looked for him the tram from Lokeren slid in, Red Cross men on the steps, clinging. The doors were flung open and the wounded men came out, stumbling, falling, pushing each other. Somebody cried, "No stretchers! Damned bad management. With the Germans on our backs." A Red Cross man, with a puffed white face, stood staring at John and Charlotte, stupefied.

"Are they coming?" John said.

"Coming? They'll be here in ten minutes—five minutes." He snarled, a terrified animal.

He had caught sight of their stretcher and snatched at it, thrusting out his face, the face of a terrified animal, open mouth, and round, palpitating eyes. He lifted his hand as though he would have struck at Charlotte, but John pushed him back. He was brutalized, made savage and cruel by terror; he had a lust to hurt.

"You can't have our stretcher," Charlotte said.

She could see they didn't want it. This was the last tram. The serious cases had been sent on first. All these men could walk or hobble along somehow with help. But they were the last in the retreat of the wounded; they were the men who had been nearest to the enemy, and they had known the extremity of fear.

"You can't have it. It's wanted for a badly wounded man."

"Where is he?"

"We don't know. We're looking for him."

"Ah, pah! We can't wait till you find him. Do you think we're going to stand here to be taken?—For one man!"

They went on through the plantation, stumbling and growling, dragging the wounded out into the road.

"If," Charlotte said, "we only knew where he was."

John stood there silent; his head was turned towards the far end of the wood, the Lokeren end. The terror of the wood held him. He seemed to be listening; listening, but only half awake.

Here, where the line stopped, a narrow track led downwards out of the wood. Charlotte started to go along it. "Come on," she said. She saw him coming, quickly, but with drawn, sleep-walking feet. The track led into a muddy alley at the back of the village.

There was a house there and a woman stood at the door, beckoning. She ran up to them. "He's here," she whispered, "he's here."

He lay on his side on the flagged floor of the kitchen. His shirt was ripped open, and in his white back, below the shoulder blade, there was a deep red wound, like a pit, with a wide mouth, gaping. He was ugly, a Flamand; he had a puffed face with pushed out lips and a scrub of red beard; but Charlotte loved him.

They carried him out through the wood on to the road. He lay inert, humped up, heavy. They had to go slowly, so slowly that they could see the wounded and the Red Cross men going on far before them, down the street.

The flagged road swayed and swung with the swinging bulge of the stretcher as they staggered. The shafts kept on slipping and slipping; her grasp closed, tighter and tighter; her arms ached in their sockets; but her fingers and the palms of her hands were firm and dry; they could keep their hold.

They had only gone a few yards along the road when suddenly John stopped and sank his end of the stretcher, compelling Charlotte to lower hers too.

"What did you do that for?"

"We can't, Charlotte. He's too damned heavy."

"If I can, you can."

He didn't move. He stood there, staring with his queer, hypnotised eyes, at the man lying in the middle of the road, at the red pit in the white back, at the wide, ragged lips of the wound, gaping.

"For goodness' sake pick him up. It isn't the moment for resting."

"Look here—it isn't good enough. We can't get him there in time."

"You're—you're not going to leave him!"

"We've got to leave him. We can't let the whole lot be taken just for one man."

"We'll be taken if you stand here talking."

He went on a step or two, slouching; then stood still, waiting for her, ashamed. He was changed from himself, seized and driven by the fear that had possessed the men in the plantation. She could see it in his retreating eyes.

She cried out—her voice sounded sharp and strange—"John—! You can't leave him."

The wounded man who had lain inert, thinking that they were only resting, now turned his head at her cry. She saw his eyes shaking, palpitating with terror.

"You've frightened him," she said. "I won't have him frightened."

She didn't really believe that John was going. He went slowly, still ashamed, and stopped again and waited for her.

"Come back," she said, "this minute, and pick up that stretcher and get on."

"I tell you it isn't good enough."

"Oh, go then, if you're such a damned coward, and send Mac to me. Or Trixie."

"They'll have gone."

He was walking backwards, his face set towards the turn of the road.

"Come on, you little fool. You can't carry him."

"I can. And I shall, if Mac doesn't come."

"You'll be taken," he shouted.

"I don't care. If I'm taken, I'm taken. I shall carry him on my back."

While John still went backwards she thought: It's all right. If he sees I'm not coming he won't go. He'll come back to the stretcher.

But John had turned and was running.

Even then she didn't realise that he was running away, that she was left there with the wounded man. Things didn't happen like that. People ran away all of a sudden, in panics, because they couldn't help it; they didn't begin by going slowly and stopping to argue and turning round and walking backwards; they were gone before they knew where they were. She believed that he was going for the ambulance. One moment she believed it and the next she knew better. As she waited in the road (conscious of the turn, the turn with its curving screen of tall trees) her knowledge, her dreadful knowledge, came to her, dark and evil, creeping up and up. John wasn't coming back. He would no more come back than he had come back the other day. Sutton had come. The other day had been like to-day. John was like that.

Her mind stood still in amazement, seeing, seeing clearly, what John was like. For a moment she forgot about the Germans.

She thought: I don't believe Mac's gone. He wouldn't go until he'd got them all in. Mac would come.

Then she thought about the Germans again. All this was making it much more dangerous for Mac and everybody, with the Germans coming round the corner any minute; she had no business to stand there thinking; she must pick that man up on her back and go on.

She stooped down and turned him over on his chest. Then, with great difficulty, she got him up on to his feet; she took him by the wrists and, stooping again, swung him on to her shoulder. These acts, requiring attention and drawing on all her energy, dulled the pain of her knowledge. When she stood up with him she saw John and McClane coming to her. She lowered her man gently back on to the stretcher.

The Flamand, thinking that she had given it up and that he was now abandoned to the Germans, groaned.

"It's all right," she said. "He's coming."

She saw McClane holding John by the arm, and in her pain there was a sharper pang. She had the illusion of his being dragged back unwillingly.

McClane smiled as he came to her. He glanced at the Flamand lying heaped on his stretcher.

"He's been too much for you, has he?"

"Too much—? Yes."

Instantly she saw that John had lied, and instantly she backed his lie. She hated McClane thinking she had failed; but anything was better than his knowing the truth.

John and McClane picked up the stretcher and went on quickly. Charlotte walked beside the Flamand with her hand on his shoulder to comfort him. Again her pity was like love.

From the top of the village she could see the opening of the lane. Down there was the house with the tall green door where the dead man was. John had said he was dead.

Supposing he wasn't? Or supposing he was still warm and limp like the boy at Melle? She must know; it was a thing she must know for certain, or she would never have any peace. And when the Flamand was laid out on McClane's table, while McClane dressed his wound, she slipped down the lane and opened the green door.

The man lay on a row of packing cases with his feet parted. She put one hand over his heart and the other on his forehead under the lock of bloodstained hair. He was dead: stiff dead and cold. His tunic and shirt had been unbuttoned to ease his last breathing. She had a queer baffled feeling of surprise and incompleteness, as if some awful sense in her would have been satisfied if she had seen that he had been living when John had said that he was dead. To-day would then have been linked on firmly to the other day.

John stood at the top of the lane. He scowled at her as she came.

"What do you think you're doing!" he said.

"I went to that house—to see if the man was dead."

"You'd no business to. I told you he was dead."

"I wanted to make sure."

* * * * *

That evening she had just gone to her room when somebody knocked at her door. McClane stood outside, straddling, his way when he had got something important on hand. He asked if he might come in and speak to her for a minute.

She sat down on the edge of her bed and he sat on Gwinnie's, elbows crooked out, hands planted on wide parted knees; he leaned forward, looking at her, his face innocent and yet astute; his thick, expressionless eyes clear now and penetrating. He seemed to be fairly humming with activity left over from the excitement of the day. He was always either dreamy and withdrawn, or bursting, bursting with energy, and at odd moments he would drop off suddenly to sleep with his chin doubled on his breast, recovering from his energy. Perhaps he had just waked up now to this freshness.

"Look here," he said. "You didn't break down. That man wasn't too heavy for you."

"He was. He was an awful weight. I couldn't have carried him a yard."

"That won't do, Charlotte. I saw you take him on your back."

She could feel the blood rising up in her face before him. He was hurting her with shame.

He persisted, merciless. "It was Conway who broke down."

She had tears now.

"Nobody knows," he said gently, "but you and me.... I want to talk to you about him. He must be got away from the Front. He must be got out of Belgium."

"You always wanted to get him away."

"Only because I saw he would break down."

"How could you tell?"

"I'm a psychotherapist. It's my business to tell."

But she was still on the defensive.

"You never liked him."

"I neither like nor dislike him. To me Conway is simply a sick man. If I could cure him—"

"Can't you?"

"Not as you think. I can't turn his cowardice into courage. I might turn it into something else but not that. That's why I say he ought to go home. You must tell him."

"I can't. Couldn't Billy tell him?"

"Well, hardly. He's his commandant."

"Can't you?"

"Not I. You know what he thinks about me."

"What?"

"That I've got a grudge against him. That I'm jealous of him. You thought it yourself."

"Did I?"

"You did. Look here, I say—I wanted to take you three into my corps. And you'd have been sent home after the Berlaere affair if I hadn't spoken for you. So much for my jealousy."

"I only thought you were jealous of John."

"Why, it was I who got him sent out that first day."

"Was it?"

"Yes. I wanted to give him his chance. And," he added meditatively, "I wanted to know whether I was right. I wanted to see what he would do."

"I don't think it now," she said, reverting.

"That's all right."

He laughed his brief, mirthless laugh, the assent of his egoism. But his satisfaction had nothing personal in it. He was pleased because justice, abstract justice, had been done. But she suspected his sincerity. He did things for you, not because he liked you, but for some other reason; and he would be so carried away by doing them that he would behave as though he liked you when he didn't, when all the time you couldn't for one minute rouse him from his immense indifference. She knew he liked her for sticking to her post and for taking the wounded man on her back, because that was the sort of thing he would have done himself. And he had only helped John because he wanted to see what he would do. Therefore she suspected his sincerity.

But, no; he wasn't jealous.

"And now," he went on, "you must get him to go home at once, or he'll have a bad break-down. You've got to tell him, Charlotte."

She stood up, ready. "Where is he?"

"By himself. In his room."

She went to him there.

He was sitting at his little table. He had been trying to write a letter, but he had pushed it from him and left it. You could see he was absorbed in some bitter meditation. She seated herself at the head of his bed, on his pillow, where she could look down at him.

"John," she said, "you can't go on like this—"

"Like what?"

He held his head high; but the excited, happy light had gone out of his eyes; they stared, not as though they saw anything, but withdrawn, as though he were contemplating the fearful memory of his fear.

And she was sorry for him, so sorry that she couldn't bear it. She bit her lip lest she should sob out with pain.

"Oh—" she said, and her pain stopped her.

"I don't know what you're talking about—'going on like this.' I'm—going—on."

"What's the good? You've had enough. If I were you I should go home. You know you can't stand it."

"What? Go and leave my cars to Sutton?"

"McClane could take them."

"I don't know how long McClane signed on for. I signed on for the duration of the war."

"There wasn't any signing on."

"Well, if you like, I swore I wouldn't go back till it was over."

"Yes, and supposing it happens again."

"What should happen again?"

"What happened this afternoon.... And it wasn't the first time."

"Do you know what happened?"

"I saw what happened. You simply went to pieces."

"My dear Charlotte, you went to pieces, if you like."

"I know that's what you told Mac. And he knows how true it is."

"Does he? Well—he shan't have my ambulances. You don't suppose I'm going to let McClane fire me out of Belgium?... I suppose he put you up to this...."

He stood up as a sign to her to leave him. "I don't see that there's anything more to be said."

"There's one thing." (She slid to her feet.) "You swore you'd stick till the war's over. I swore, if I had to choose between you and the wounded, it shouldn't be you."

"You haven't got to choose. You've only got to obey orders...."

His face stiffened. He looked like some hard commander imposing an unanswerable will.

"... The next time," he said, "you'll be good enough to remember that I settle what risks are to be taken, not you."

Her soul stiffened, too, and was hard. She stood up against him with her shoulder to the door.

"It sounds all right," she said. "But the next time I'll carry him on my back all the way."

* * * * *

She went to bed with her knowledge. He funked and lied. The two things she couldn't stand. His funk and his lying were a real part of him. And it was as if she had always known it, as if all the movements of her mind had been an effort to escape her knowledge.

She opened her eyes. Something hurt them. Gwinnie, coming late to bed, had turned on the electric light. And as she rolled over, turning her back to the light and to Gwinnie, her mind shifted. It saw suddenly the flame leaping in John's face. His delight in danger, that happiness he felt when he went out to meet it, happiness springing up bright and new every day; that was a real part of him. She couldn't doubt it. She knew. And she was left with her queer, baffled sense of surprise and incompleteness. She couldn't see the nature of the bond between these two realities.

That was his secret, his mystery.



XII

She woke very early in the morning with one clear image in her mind: what John had done yesterday.

Her mind seemed to have watched all night behind her sleep to attack her with it in the first moment of waking. She had got to come to a clear decision about that. If Billy Sutton had done it, or one of McClane's chauffeurs, her decision would have been very clear. She would have said he was a filthy coward and dismissed him from her mind. But John couldn't be dismissed. His funk wasn't like other people's funk. Coupled with his ecstatic love of danger it had an unreal, fantastic quality. Somehow she couldn't regard his love of danger as an unreal, fantastic thing. It had come too near her; it had moved her too profoundly and too long; she had shared it as she might have shared his passion.

So that, even in the sharp, waking day she felt his fear as a secret, mysterious thing. She couldn't account for it. She didn't, considering the circumstances, she didn't judge the imminence of the Germans to be a sufficient explanation. It was as incomprehensible to-day as it had been yesterday.

But there was fear and fear. There was the cruel, animal fear of the Belgians in the plantation, fear that was dark to itself and had no sadness in it; and there was John's fear that knew itself and was sad. The unbearable, inconsolable sadness of John's fear! After all, you could think of him as a gentle thing, caught unaware in a trap and tortured. And who was she to judge him? She in her "armour" and he in his coat of nerves. His knowledge and his memory of his fear would be like a raw open wound in his mind; and her knowledge of it would be a perpetual irritant, rubbing against it and keeping up the sore. Last night she hadn't done anything to heal him; she had only hurt.... And if she gave John up his wound would never heal. She owed a sort of duty to the wound.

Of course, like John, she would go on remembering what had happened yesterday. She would never get over it any more than he would. Yet, after all, yesterday was only one day out of his life. There might never be another like it. And to set against yesterday there was their first day at Berlaere and the day afterwards at Melle; there was yesterday morning and there was that other day at Melle. She had no business to suppose that he had done then what he did yesterday. They had settled that once for all at the time, when he said Billy Sutton had told him she was going back with him. It all hung on that. If that was right, the rest was right....

Supposing Billy hadn't told him anything of the sort, though? She would never know that. She couldn't say to Billy: "Did you tell John I was going back with you? Because; if you didn't—" She would have to leave that as it was, not quite certain.... And she couldn't be quite certain whether the boy had been dead or alive. And ... No. She couldn't get over it, John's cowardice. It had destroyed the unique, beautiful happiness she had had with him.

For it was no use saying that courage, physical courage, didn't count. She could remember a long conversation she had had with George Corfield, the man who wanted to marry her, about that. He had said courage was the least thing you could have. That only meant that, whatever else you hadn't, you must have that. It was a sort of trust. You were trusted not to betray defenceless things. A coward was a person who betrayed defenceless things. George had said that the world's adoration of courage was the world's cowardice, its fear of betrayal. That was a question for cowards to settle among themselves. The obligation not to betray defenceless things remained. It was so simple and obvious that people took it for granted; they didn't talk about it. They didn't talk about it because it was so deep and sacred, like honour and like love; so that, when John had talked about it she had always felt that he was her lover, saying the things that other men might not say, things he couldn't have said to any other woman.

It was inconceivable that he—It couldn't have happened. As he had said of the defeat of Belgium, it was so bad that it couldn't happen. Odd, that the other day she had accepted at once a thing she didn't know for certain, while now she fought fiercely against a thing she knew; and always the memory of it, returning, beat her down.

She had to make up her mind on what terms she would live with it and whether she would live with it at all. Supposing it happened again? Supposing you had always to go in fear of its happening?... It mightn't happen. Funk might be a thing that attacked you like an illness, or like drink, in fits, with long, calm intervals between. She wondered what it would feel like to be subject to attacks. Perhaps you would recover; you would be on the look-out, and when you felt another fit coming on you could stave it off or fight it down. And the first time wouldn't count because you had had no warning. It wouldn't be fair to give him up because of the first time.

He would have given her up, he would have left her to the Germans—Yes; but if she broke with him now she would never get beyond that thought, she would never get beyond yesterday; she would always see it, the flagged road swinging with the swinging bulge of the stretcher, the sudden stopping, the Flamand with his wound, the shafts of the stretcher, suddenly naked, sticking out; and then all the fantastic, incredible movements of John's flight. Her mind would separate from him on that, closing everything down, making his act eternal.

And, after all, the Germans hadn't come round the corner. Perhaps he wouldn't have left her if they had really come. How did she know what he wouldn't have done?

No. That was thin. Thin. She couldn't take herself in quite in that way. It was the way she had tried with Gibson Herbert. When he did anything she loathed she used to pretend he hadn't done it. But with John, if she didn't give him up, her eyes must always be open. Perhaps they would get beyond yesterday. Perhaps she would see other things, go on with him to something new, forgetting. Her unique, beautiful happiness was smashed. Still, there might be some other happiness, beautiful, though not with the same beauty.

If John had got the better of his fear—She thought of all the men she had ever heard of who had done that, coming out in the end heroic, triumphant.

* * * * *

Three things, three little things that happened that morning, that showed the way his mind was working. Things that she couldn't get over, that she would never forget.

John standing on the hospital steps, watching Trixie Rankin and Alice Bartrum as they started with the ambulances; the fierce fling of his body, turning away.

His voice saying, "I loathe those women. There's Alice Bartrum—I saw her making eyes at Sutton over a spouting artery. As for Mrs. Rankin they ought to intern her. She oughtn't to be allowed within ten miles of any army. That's one thing I like about McClane. He can't stand that sort of thing any more than I can."

"How about Gwinnie and me?"

"Gwinnie hangs her beastly legs about all over the place. So do you."

John standing at the foot of the stairs, looking at the Antwerp men. Their heads and faces were covered with a white mask of cotton wool like a diver's helmet, three small holes in each white mask for mouth and eyes. They were the men whose faces had been burned by fire at Antwerp.

"Come away," she said. But he still stood, fascinated, hypnotised by the white masks.

"If I were to stick there, doing nothing, looking at the wounded, I should go off my head."

"My God! So should I. Those everlasting wounds. They make you dream about them. Disgusting dreams. I never really see the wound, but I'm just going to see it. I know it's going to be more horrible than any wound I've ever seen. And then I wake.... That's why I don't look at them more than I can help."

"You're looking at them now," she said.

"Oh, them. That's nothing. Cotton wool."

And she, putting her hand on his arm to draw him up the stairs, away. John shaking her hands off and his queer voice rising. "I wish you wouldn't do that, Charlotte. You know I hate it."

He had never said anything to her like that before. It hadn't struck her before that, changed to himself, he would change to her. He hadn't got over last night. She had hurt him; her knowledge of his cowardice hurt him; and this was how he showed his pain.

She thought: Here's Antwerp falling and Belgium beaten. And all those wounded. And the dead.... And here am I, bothering about these little things, as if they mattered. Three little things.

* * * * *

The fire from the battlefield had raked the village street as they came in; but it had ceased now. The cure had been through it all, going up and down, helping with the stretchers. John was down there in the wine-shop, where the soldiers were, looking for more wounded.

They had found five in the stable yard, waiting to be taken away; they had moved four of them into the ambulance. The fifth, shot through the back of his head, still lay on the ground on a stretcher that dripped blood. Charlotte stood beside him.

The cure came to her there. He was slender and lean in his black cassock. He had a Red Cross brassard on his sleeve, and in one hand he carried his missal and in the other the Host and the holy oils in a little bag of purple silk. He looked down at the stretcher and he looked at Charlotte, smiling faintly.

"Where is Monsieur?" he said.

"In the wine-shop, looking for wounded."

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 cure 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 cure 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 by the tail of the car. She could have cried then because of the sheer beauty of the cure's act, even while she wondered whether perhaps the wafer on his tongue might not choke the dying man.

The cure hovered on the edge of the car, stooping with a certain awkwardness; she took from him his missal and his purple bag as he gathered his cassock about him and came down.

"Can I do anything, Monsieur?"

"No, Mademoiselle. It is done."

His eyes smiled at her; but his lips were quivering as he took again his missal and his purple bag. She watched him going on slowly down the street till he turned into the wine-shop. She wondered: Had he seen? Did he know why John was there? In another minute John came out, hurrying to the car.

He glanced down at the blood stains by the back step; then he looked in; and when he saw the man lying on the stretcher he turned on her in fury.

"What are you thinking of? I told you you weren't to take him."

"I had to. I couldn't leave him there. I thought—"

"You've no business to think."

"Well, but the cure—"

"The cure doesn't know anything about it."

"I don't care. If he's in a clean bed—if they take his boots off—"

"I told you they can't spare clean beds for corpses. He'll be dead before you can get him there."

"Not if we're quick."

"Nonsense. We must get him out of that."

He seized the handle of the stretcher and began pulling; she hung on to his arm and stopped that.

"No. No," she said. "You shan't touch him."

He flung her arm off and turned. "You fool," he said. "You fool."

She looked at him steadily, a long look that remembered, that made him remember.

"There isn't time," she said. "They'll begin firing in another minute."