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.