The Belfry

by May Sinclair

XIV

We had breakfast very early the next morning, for Jevons was under orders to start at eight o'clock for Termonde. We had a table reserved for us in a corner of the restaurant. The hotel was full of Belgian officers, and I found I was infinitely better off in attaching myself to Jevons than if I had joined the war-correspondents.

Viola (I may say that her rig-out which Jevons had admired so much, the khaki tunic and breeches, made us terribly conspicuous) had come down in a contrite mood. I heard her telling Jevons that he must be kind to me, for I had had an awful time with her and I had been an angel.

Well, I had had an awful time; I don't think I remember ever having had a worse time than the hours I had spent in her company since she had laid into me on Tuesday evening.

But I had not been an angel; far from it. Looking back on those hours, I can see that I behaved to her like a perfect brute.

She had her revenge. One of those revenges that are the more triumphant because they are unpremeditated. She had dished me as a war-correspondent.

For I declare that from the moment when we found Jevons and his General in the hotel I became the victim of her miserable point of view. I could only see the war through Jevons, and as a part of Jevons; I might have said, like Viola, that to me Ghent was Jevons, and Belgium was Jevons, and the war was Jevons. I suppose I saw as much of the War from first to last as any Special Correspondent at the front, and I know, that, barring the Siege of Antwerp, the three weeks when Jimmy was in it were by no means the most important or the most thrilling weeks in the war; and of the one event, the Siege of Antwerp, I didn't see as much as I ought to have seen, being most terribly handicapped by Viola. And yet—perhaps a little because of Viola, but infinitely more because of Jevons—those three weeks stand out in my memory before the battles of the Aisne and Marne and the long fight for Calais. Because of Jevons I have made them figure, in the columns of the Morning Standard and elsewhere, with a superior vividness; even now when I recall them I seem to have lived with Jevons in Flanders through long periods of time.

I have the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of the Morning Standard, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written a very fine account of Melle, which I understand is a small village four and a-half miles from Ghent. But there are other events—the Fall of Antwerp, for instance."

Well, we got the story of the Fall of Antwerp all right. But Jimmy wrote it for me. It was the last thing he did write.

Yes: he had only three weeks of it, all told. He went out on Tuesday, September the twenty-second, and he came back on Tuesday, October the thirteenth. It was his infernal luck that he should have had no more of it.

And yet, I don't know. I don't see how he could have held out much longer at his pitch of intensity. Three weeks would have been nothing to any other man. But Jevons could do more with three weeks than another man could do with a three years' campaign, and he contrived to crowd into his term the maximum of glory and of risk. And when it was all over it was less as if Fate had foiled him than as if he had "given" himself three weeks.

But Jimmy was discontented, and every morning at breakfast we listened to the most extraordinary lamentations. His job, he said, wasn't at all the jolly thing it looked. For he was under orders the whole blessed time. He'd no more freedom, hadn't Jimmy, than that poor devil of a waiter. He'd got to go or to stay where a fussy old ram of a Colonel sent him. So here he was in Ghent, an open city, when he wanted to be in Antwerp. He hadn't been anywhere—anywhere at all. As for what he'd done, he couldn't see what the fuss was all about. He hadn't done anything. He'd seen a little fight in a turnip-field, and a little squabble for a bridge you could blow up to-day and build again to-morrow, and a little tin-pot town peppered. And look at the war! Just look at the war!

And when we tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo, the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There wouldn't be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said. "There won't be any Waterloo for another two years, if then."

He wasn't always lugubrious. It was only when he thought that he was missing the Siege of Antwerp that his happiness was incomplete.

It was on our third morning, when he rushed off joyously (to Quatrecht, I think), that I said to Viola, "You thought it would hurt him more than other people. You needn't have come out after him. You see how much it's hurting him."

"I'm glad I came," she said. "I don't mind as long as I can see."

"Do you remember him telling Reggie that he wouldn't be in the war because he was a coward? Don't you wish Reggie could see him now?"

She didn't answer, and I saw that there was still a sting for her in Reggie's name. The war might have made her forgive him, but there were things that the war couldn't wipe out from her memory. And there was her own rather appalling injustice to Jimmy. I wondered whether she was thinking of how she had tried to stop his going to the front, and how she had said he didn't want to go.

But I had to own that she had done the best thing for her peace of mind by coming out.

My peace of mind, I was told quite frankly, didn't matter. Jevons, though he admitted that I couldn't have stopped her coming out, made me responsible for her presence at the seat of war. The trouble was that she insisted on following him wherever he went. And as it wasn't to be expected that he would take her with him into the tight places that he managed to get into in his own car, I had to have her in mine. Not that Viola consented to my putting it that way. It was clear that she made herself mistress of the situation when she obtained possession of that car and manoeuvred (as I am convinced she did manoeuvre) for my own failure with the firm that supplied it. On our first morning in Ghent we came to what she called an understanding, when she rubbed it well into me that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out, and that the man was under her orders, not mine. If I liked to come with her, why, of course I could. Otherwise, I could go halves with one of the other correspondents in one of their cars. But she pointed out that I could hardly do better than come with her, for by simply following Jimmy I should get nearer to the firing-line than anybody else. (She had assumed that the firing-line was the goal of every war-correspondent's ambition.) I would find, she said, that it would work quite well.

It did. It worked better than if I had gone halves with the other correspondents. For at this time war-correspondents were not greatly loved by the military authorities, and they were having considerable difficulty in getting near anything, and the time, Jimmy said, was coming when they would be cleared neck and crop out of Belgium. My astute sister-in-law had calculated on all this and on her own part in it.

"If you'll only trust me, Wally," she said the first day we started, when all the correspondents in the hotel had turned out to see us off, "you'll find that I'm your Providence and not your curse. I can get you through where you'd never get yourself. Just look at those men how sick they are."

I said I thought it would be only decent to take two or three of them with us. We had room.

But Viola was firm. She said it would be most indecent. We should want all the room we had for our wounded.

"Do you suppose I'm going to chivy Jimmy about without doing anything to help him? As for you, you've only to sit tight and do what you're told. You'll be all right as long as we follow Jimmy."

And so we followed him. My God, what a chase! But Viola's little chauffeur was game and we followed. Though Jimmy had made elaborate arrangements for stopping his wife's progress at least two miles outside the danger-zone she always managed to get through. Sentries, colonels, army medical officers—she twisted them into coils round her little finger, and cast them from her and got through. And once through, we were really quite useful in transporting wounded. Jevons and I between us managed to keep her out of the actual firing-line by telling her she was in all of it there was; and when we were loaded up with wounded there was no difficulty in getting her away.

And certainly it served my turn well enough. Though I was compelled to see the war through Jimmy, I saw the war.

By the end of our first week Jimmy seemed to get used to being followed as a matter of course. We had followed him to Alost and Termonde and Quatrecht and Zele. When we weren't following him we were near him somewhere, working at the dressing-stations or among the refugees.

Then he did a mean thing. He managed to get himself sent to Antwerp for three days. He sneaked off there by himself on the Sunday, and when we tried to follow him we were turned back at Saint Nicolas, just too late to see the British go through. He had worked it this time.

When he got back from Antwerp at the end of his three days we knew that something had happened, something that he was keeping from us. It wasn't only the fate of Antwerp that was hanging over him, as it hung over all of us in that awful second week. It was as if he had seen something intimate and terrible that he couldn't talk about.

That night after Viola had gone to her room he told me what had happened. He had seen Charlie Thesiger's regiment at Saint Nicolas on Sunday. And to-day—which was Tuesday—he had seen Charlie Thesiger. He had found him lying dangerously wounded in the British Hospital at Antwerp. That, he said, was what had kept him there. And he had brought him back with him to Ghent. He was in the Couvent de Saint Pierre.

He thought, perhaps, it would be better not to tell Viola just yet.
Charlie didn't know, he said, that she was here.

The war was beginning to close round us.

* * * * *

The next day (Wednesday) he announced that he was going to Zele; but he didn't, he really didn't want me to take Viola there. I could go by myself, of course, if I liked, though he didn't care about her being left.

But we did go. Viola's blood was up, after what she called Jimmy's meanness, and there was no keeping her back.

We were a little uncertain of our way, for following Jimmy as we did, or rather, following the direction Colville swore he had seen him start in, took us much too far to the north. We found ourselves on the Antwerp road, jammed in the traffic, and caught by a stream of refugees. We were obliged to turn back to Ghent to get our bearings, but the business of transporting women and children kept us on the Antwerp road all morning, and it was past two o'clock before we started for Zele.

I remember this particular chase after Jimmy for many reasons. First, we lost our way and never got to Zele at all.

Down in the south-east on the sky-line we saw a fleet of little clouds that seemed to be anchored to the earth, and every cloud of the fleet was the smoke from a burning village. West of the fleet was an enormous cloud blown by the wind across miles of sky.

Viola was certain that the big cloud was Zele being burned to the ground, and that Jimmy would be burned with it.

When I told her that it wasn't likely that Jimmy would stay in Zele when it was burning she said that I didn't know Jimmy, and anyhow it was there that she was going.

Suddenly Viola sat up very straight.

"Furny, is that guns I hear, or thunder?"

I said it was guns. A deep and solemn booming came from before and behind us and on either side, east and west. We had rushed bang between the French and German batteries.

The big cloud turned out to be smoke from a factory that the Belgians had set fire to themselves, and in following it we had gone miles from Zele. Now we followed the guns.

We turned east and struck off south and found ourselves in the village of
Baerlere. The lines of fire seemed suddenly to narrow in on us here.

There was a clean path down the centre of the street, for men and horses stood back close under the housewalls on each side. The place was full of soldiers. One of them told us that we could get to Zele by going east through the village, but as the road was being shelled, he didn't advise us to try.

We went down that clean middle of the street. We were safe enough as long as we ran between the houses; but the village very soon came to an end, and then, in the open road, we were in for it.

The fields dropped away from us on each side, leaving us as naked to the German batteries as if we were running on a raised causeway. At the bottom of the fields to our right there was a line of willows, beyond the willows there was the river, and behind the river bank, on the further side, were the German lines.

The grey smoke of their fire was still tangled in the willow-tops.

Colville drew up under the lee of the last house in the village. He didn't like the look of that open road. Neither did I.

"Go on," said Viola. "What are you stopping for?"

The guns ceased firing for a moment and we rushed it.

"I do wish," said Viola, "you'd tuck your arm in, Furny. It's your right arm and you're on the wrong side of the car."

I asked her what made her think of my right arm just then.

"Because it's the only part of himself that Jimmy ever thinks of," she said.

There was about three-quarters of a mile of causeway and it ended in a little hamlet. And the hamlet—it had been knocked to bits before we got into it—the hamlet ended in a hillock of bricks and mortar.

The road to Zele was completely blocked.

"Well—" said Colville, "I am blowed."

"You've got to take it," said Viola.

"Sorry, m'm. It can't be done. You want a motor traction with caterpillar wheels for this business."

He was backing the car when a shell burst and buried itself in the place where we had stood.

To my horror I saw that Viola had opened the door of the car and was getting out.

"What on earth are you doing?" I said.

"I'm going to walk to Zele."

I pulled her back and held her down in her seat by main force. She was horribly strong. And as she struggled with me she said quietly, "It's all right. You two must go back and I must go to Jimmy."

I shouted to Colville, "Turn her round, can't you, and get out of this."

He turned her. He drew up deftly under the shelter of a barn that still stood intact. Then he spoke.

"Are you quite sure, sir, that Mr. Jevons is in that place? Because, sir,
I heard Kendal say something this morning about their going to Antwerp."

"Then why the devil didn't you say so?"

"I didn't think of it, sir, until I saw Mrs. Jevons getting out."

He added by way of afterthought, "Besides, I promised Kendal. You and
Mrs. Jevons wasn't to know he was going on to Antwerp."

Viola and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

Somewhere behind us from beyond the river a gun boomed and we took no notice of it. We went on laughing.

"He's had us again," she said.

"Yes. We've been done this time. Well—we'd better scoot."

We made a rush for it between guns and got to Baerlere. Once we were out of the village and heading for the Ghent road we were safe.

We were hardly out of sound of the guns when I heard Viola saying, "You know it really was funny of Jimmy."

I said, "He won't think it quite so funny when he hears what we've done."

He didn't think it funny at all. He was furious when he heard what we'd
done. He forbade Viola to follow him again. He threatened to sack
Colville. He said he'd have me sent home to-morrow and kept there, and
Viola should go with me.

And when he'd finished he told us that Antwerp had fallen.

That was how Jevons came to write the story of the Fall of Antwerp instead of me.

Well, he didn't sack Colville; and he didn't get me packed off with the other war-correspondents who left Ghent in a body the next day. And he said nothing about sending Viola away. He did better than that. He told her he had brought Charlie Thesiger from Antwerp yesterday, and that her cousin was dying in the Couvent de Saint Pierre, and that perhaps it would be a bit easier for him if she were with him.

We took her to the convent that morning. On the way there she asked Jimmy why he hadn't told her about Charlie yesterday. He said that up till midnight we weren't absolutely certain that Charlie wouldn't recover, and that she was safer with us in the hotel than she would be away from us in the convent.

"My safety is to be considered before everything?" she said.

He answered that it was surely enough for her if he risked it now.

I can't think why she didn't see through him. I and Kendal and Colville knew perfectly well that he was taking her to the convent to be safe. I think he argued that if she had poor Charlie to look after it would keep her quiet, and she would be out of mischief till it was time for the Germans to march into Ghent.

So we took her to him.

We found him in a little whitewashed cell that one of the sisters had given up to him. He lay under a crucifix on the nun's narrow bed, which was too short for him, so that his naked feet showed through the blankets at the bottom. The naked feet of the Christ pointed downwards to his head.

He had been shot through the lungs and was dying of pneumonia, sending out his breath in fierce, rapid jerks.

He lay on his side with his back towards us, and his face was hidden from us as we came in.

The sister who sat with him made a sign that said, "Oh yes, you can come in, all of you; it will make no difference."

The cell was so small that Jevons and I had to draw back and let Viola go in by herself. We two stood in the doorway and looked in. After the first glance at the bed—it was enough for me—I looked, I couldn't help looking, at Viola, (Jevons, I noticed, kept his eyes fixed on the body of the dying man.) I heard her catch her breath in a sob before she could have seen him.

He had slipped his blankets from his shoulder, and it was the sight of his back—under the half-open hospital shirt which showed the bandages and dressings of his wound—that upset her; his back that might have been any man's back, the innocent back that she had no memory of, that disguised and hid him from her and made him strange to her and utterly pathetic. And then, there was the back of his head, sunk like lead into his pillow. The cropped hair had begun to grow. You could see a little greyish tuft. You wouldn't have known that it was Charlie's head.

She went slowly round the bed, taking care not to graze the feet that were stretched out to her. And then she saw him.

She saw a deep purplish flush and glazed eyes that couldn't see her, and a greyish beard pointing on an unshaved jaw; and a mouth half open, jerking out its breath. She laid her left hand on his shoulder and with her right she held the limp hand that hung over the mattress.

I heard her say in French, "If only he knew me—"

And the nun, "Perhaps—at the end—he will know you."

And we left her there with his hand in her right hand and her left hand on his shoulder. She was on her honour to stay with him till the end; but her eyes were fixed on Jevons, and they followed him as he went through the doorway of the cell.

* * * * *

The very minute he had left her Jimmy made his bolt for Lokeren. He said he didn't want me; but I had seen Viola's eyes, and I said it would be safer. If I took Viola's car and Colville, she couldn't follow us.

"She won't follow us," he said. "She can't leave him."

We made the first bolt into Lokeren together; and we got out, each with a load of wounded, just as the Germans were coming in. He made his second bolt by himself and secretly, while Colville and I were lunching. We followed, and were stopped in a village two miles from Lokeren.

A Belgian Red Cross man met us here and told us that Jevons had got through in spite of them, and they didn't in the least expect him to come back again. He shrugged his shoulders and seemed to be disgusted and annoyed with Jimmy rather than to admire him.

We hung about in that village an interminable time. I do not remember its name, if I ever knew it; but I know and remember every house in it and every tree in the avenue at the turn of the grey road that led to Lokeren, and even now, in my worst dreams, I find myself in the little plantation at the end of the village on the left where the railway siding is, and where the trains came in loaded with wounded. I am always waiting for Jimmy and looking for Jimmy and not finding him. And at one point I always stumble over Viola's body. I find her lying wounded in a ditch that runs through the plantation. And when I find her I know that Jimmy is dead. And that frightens me—Jimmy's death, I mean, not Viola's body. I take Viola's body as a matter of course.

It is an abominable dream.

But even that dream is not more astonishing, and it is far less improbable than what I was to see. We were at the end of the village. Colville had drawn our car up in the middle of the street, and I was standing by him, when two Belgian soldiers rushed up to us, pointing up the road, and shouting to Colville to clear out of the way.

I turned. Round the bend of the road where the avenue of trees was I saw a train of horses and gun-carriages careening with the curve, and a battery of Belgian artillery came charging down in full retreat. And now in the middle of the battery as if he were part of it and informed it with his energy and speed, and now in front of it as if he led it, and joyous as if he had turned its retreat into a victory, came Jimmy driving his car.

The inside of the car was packed with wounded men; and, wedged up against Jimmy, and standing on the steps, and sitting on the bonnet, and hanging on wherever they could find a foothold and hang, were seven officers and soldiers of the Belgian Army.

Kendal—bleeding profusely from a flesh wound on his forehead, but otherwise unhurt—sat inside among the wounded.

It had been a victory for Jimmy. He had advanced within fifty yards of the German lines, he had picked up two of his wounded from under their sentry's fire, and the rest of the men and the officers he had gathered on his way.

We sent them all to Ghent with Colville.

Before he left, Kendal implored us just to look at Mr. Jevons's car.

Mr. Jevons's car was worth looking at. It had a hole in the back of it where a bullet had gone clean through and buried itself in the cushions. There were five bullet-holes in its hood. Its flank was scraped by a flying fragment of shell, the same that had tilted its right rear splash-board. Inside, its canvas covers and its rubber mat were stained with blood.

Drawn up motionless in that village street and stared at, Jimmy's car had something of its old self-conscious air. It looked pleased, and at the same time surprised at itself.

And while Jevons was dressing and bandaging his flesh-wound for him an idea struck Kendal and he grinned.

"D'you remember the time, sir, when you wouldn't let her out if there was a spot of rain?"

"I do," said Jevons.

"And look at her now—not three weeks. What a life she's 'ad!"

And when Kendal (he was as pleased as Punch with his bandage) when Kendal had climbed into Colville's car, Jimmy turned his round again; though the officers implored him to come on, for the Germans were on our backs. But Jimmy only jerked his thumb in the direction of Lokeren and made his third bolt. I scrambled in beside him as he started.

I don't mind saying that I hated this adventure. It was one thing to go into Antwerp when the Germans were so busy storming it that they couldn't attend to you, and quite another thing to be alone with Jimmy on that horrid grey road with the Germans coming every minute round the turn of it.

Jimmy explained that there was a wounded man hiding in a ditch about a mile from Lokeren, and he'd got to fetch him.

We fetched him and another car-load without any misadventure.

When we got back to our village we found a Field Ambulance there. Jimmy said, "I believe that's my Field Ambulance." Presently he gave a start that made the car swerve as if he had run over a dog.

"Well, I'm damned if there isn't Viola."

Yes, there she was. She had come out with the Field Ambulance. And it was Jimmy's Field Ambulance, the one that had been sent out without him. It had come on into Ghent from Antwerp yesterday, and Viola had found it.

"This is too bad," said Jevons. "You ought to be looking after Charlie.
Why aren't you looking after him?"

"Charlie," she said, "died three hours ago—at twelve o'clock."

It wasn't five hours since we had left her with him in the nun's cell under the crucifix. I don't think I had realized it before, but now it came over me as a new and strange thing, how little he had mattered. Then it struck me that Jevons must have known it all the time.

"I've done everything," she said, "that had to be done. And I've written to Aunt Matty and Uncle George—and Mildred."

"Mildred?" I wondered.

"Well—yes."

Jevons and I had forgotten Mildred. We had forgotten her engagement to Charlie, though I suppose nobody knew better than we did why it had been broken off.

To his father and mother and Mildred he did matter.

And perhaps he mattered to Viola, in a way; for she said she would have given anything to have saved him. He must have mattered to Jevons when he brought him from Antwerp and when we buried him in Ghent.

And the cross on his grave reproves me, reminding me that to his country he mattered supremely, after all.

* * * * *

After Lokeren Jevons and I tried to come to terms with Viola.

The conference took place upstairs in their bedroom, where we had withdrawn for greater privacy. Viola sat on the one chair and Jimmy and I on the bed. Jimmy did most of the talking.

He said, "Look here, my dear child, if there wasn't a war on, I wouldn't stand in the way of your amusement for the world. And there's a great deal to be said for you. I think you adorable in a tunic and breeches, and General Roubaix agrees with me, if Furny doesn't. We all think you heroic, and you are sometimes useful. But there isn't a thing you've done yet that a man can't do better—except getting Furny through the lines, and nobody wants Furny in the lines. And when you're in them you've a moral effect equal to about ten seventeen-inch guns. If the men see you hovering round their trenches they're so jumpy they can hardly hold their rifles. If Kendal sees you he's so jumpy he can hardly steer. Colville says he'd rather hang himself than go through another day like Baerlere. Furny all but lost his job on the Morning Standard because he was told off to look after you when he ought to have gone to Antwerp—he would have lost it if I hadn't done his work for him. And you don't make things easier for me. Good God!—sometimes I don't know what I'm doing.

"It isn't fair on us. It isn't fair."

"It isn't fair on me," she said. "I'm jumpy when I'm kept back. You don't know what it's like, Jimmy. Don't turn me back."

And the poor child began to talk about her duty to the wounded, and that made him burst out again.

"The wounded? If you think you're any more comfort to the wounded than you are to Furny and me I can tell you you're mistaken. There was a poor devil at Lokeren the other day with a bullet in his stomach who told me he didn't mind his wounds and he didn't mind the Germans; what worried him was the lady being there when he wasn't able to defend her."

She tilted her chin at that and said she didn't want anybody to defend her.

"Perhaps you don't, but what would you think of a man who didn't want to defend you? What would you think of Furny and me if we wanted you to be here?"

"I should like you to want me," she said.

"No, my dear child, you wouldn't. You don't know what you're saying."

And then he said, "I know better than you do what you want. Men aren't made like that—if they are men. You can't have it both ways." And he said something about chivalry that drove her back in sheer self-defence on a Feminist line. She said that nowadays women had chivalry too.

"And our chivalry is to go down before yours?"

"Can't you have both?"

"Not in war-time. Your chivalry is to keep back and not make yourself a danger and a nuisance."

"Come," she said, "what about Joan of Arc?" And that was too much for Jimmy. He jumped up off the bed and walked away from her and sat on the table as if it gave him some advantage.

"No, no," he said. "I can't stand that rot. When you're a saint—or I'm a saint—you can talk about Joan of Arc. If you want to be Joan of Arc go and be it with some man who isn't your husband—who isn't in love with you. Perhaps he won't mind. Go with Furny if you like, though it's rather hard on him."

I said I thought he was rather hard on Viola—if he'd seen the poor child at Baerlere, flinging herself out of the car and proposing to climb over the ruins of several houses and walk by herself—under shell-fire—to Zele, because she thought he was there—

Jimmy looked at her; and he did what he had done that night when he saw her coming towards him in the lounge. He sighed a long sigh of complicated anguish and satisfaction.

She heard it and she understood it, and she said, "I can't help it if I am like that. You'll have to take the risk of me. Please go away, Furny."

And I went.

* * * * *

Norah has been reading what I've just written, and she tells me that there's a great deal about Jimmy's "joy" and his "adventure" and all that; and not one word about his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice. She says I don't give a serious impression of him. He might have gone out to the war just for fun, and that it isn't fair to him.

I don't know whether it's fair or not. I write as he compels me to write. I find that I cannot separate his joy and his adventure from his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice; he didn't separate them himself. I don't even know that self-sacrifice is really the word for it; and the impression he gave me is just that—of going out for fun. It was the wild humour of his devotion that made it the spectacle it was.

(She has told me that it's all right, so long as I recognize that it was devotion.)

After Lokeren I had no desire to go through the rest of the war with Jimmy. To be with Jimmy was destruction to your sense of values. I have got it firmly fixed in my head that the taking of Lokeren was an important affair.

As for what Jimmy called the "tinpot bombardment of Melle" (there was nothing wrong with his sense of values), I shall see it insanely, for ever and ever, as the event of the war.

And there is this to be said, that Lokeren filled the last gap in the line closing round Ghent, north, south and east, and drew it tighter. And Melle (only four and a-half miles away) was the last point in the German advance on Ghent. The taking of Melle would be a sign to us that the game was up.

For three days Jimmy operated joyously in the village and over the leagues of turnip-fields that lay outside it.

Of the first two days I remember an endless tramping over endless furrows that were ditches for the dead; an endless staggering under stretchers that dripped blood; an endless struggling with Viola to keep her under shelter of the walls; each of those acts seemed to be endless, though one gave place to the other, and it was only the firing that went on all the time, till even Jimmy complained once or twice that he was fed up with it.

I remember that Jimmy's Field Ambulance played a great part in these adventures. I remember feeling a malicious satisfaction in the thought that at the same time it was compelled to witness his performances. It couldn't miss him.

I remember all these things; but of Melle itself I remember nothing but the Town Hall, with its double flight of steps up to its door, and the two tall stone pillars, one on each side of the door, and the Greek pediment above it; that and the little old Flemish house that stood back by itself on the other side of the road, and its white walls and its red-tiled roof, and the two green poplars in its garden, mounting guard. The house and its garden and its poplars are always vivid and still; they always appear to me as charged with mystery and significance and as connected in some secret way with Jimmy's fate.

In the pauses of our movements the Field Ambulance and Jimmy's car and Viola's were always drawn up before the Town Hall, facing the little house.

Then came Sunday, the eleventh, the third day of Melle, when Viola was left behind at Ghent.

Jimmy had made her promise on her honour to be brave, this time, and stay in the hotel and wait for orders.

Colville stayed with her. They were to pack our things and be ready to leave at a minute's notice. Colville had secret orders that, if we were not back by midnight, he was to take Viola on to Bruges in his car, and wait for us there.

For we knew now that we were in for it.

And we knew that the war, which was coming closer and closer to the city, was coming closer to us. It had been Charlie Thesiger first, now it might be Reggie. At least, we knew that Reggie's regiment, the Third ——shires, had come up from Ostend the day before, that it was quartered somewhere between Ghent and Melle, and that it had been engaged at Quatrecht.

Our own orders were to stick to Melle.

I suppose from the way the ambulances were massed there that the end had been foreseen. That afternoon the battle began to sweep round from Quatrecht to Melle; and on our third journey out a rumour reached us at the barrier where the sentry stood guard. It was one of those preposterous rumours that run before disaster and are started God knows how when a retreat begins. I think it was the Belgian Red Cross men who spread it, for I heard the guide who went with Jimmy's Field Ambulance assuring him seriously that seven thousand British had been surrounded and cut to pieces on the road between Quatrecht and Melle. To be sure the number diminished with each repetition of the tale, dropping from seven thousand to seven hundred and from seven hundred to seventy. But in another hour we were bringing in the men of the ——shires.

And towards the end of the day the real bombardment of Melle began, and on our last journey out we and Jimmy's Field Ambulance were in the thick of it.

I can remember nothing of that bombardment but the three shells.

The first ripped open the roof of the Town Hall and set fire to it.

The second struck the Greek pediment and brought the whole front toppling into the street.

Then, about five minutes after, there was the third shell.

The light was going out of the sky, so that we saw the first shell like a sheet of curved lightning making for the village as we approached from the Ghent side. There was a deadly attraction about the thing that made you feel that it and you were the only objects in God's universe, and that you were about to be merged in each other. It looked as if it were rushing out of heaven straight for us, so that we were surprised when it apparently swerved aside and hit the Town Hall instead.

(Jimmy and I were in the front of the car. Kendal, whose flesh wound was beginning to worry him, sat behind.)

A battery of artillery charged past us, followed by the remnants of a French regiment on the run. Jimmy put more speed on. By the time we got into the village the Town Hall was spouting flame.

Jimmy drew up his car about fifty yards away from it. The Field Ambulance had turned, and took its stand a little further away behind us, under the cover of the opposite walls. Its men began dragging out their stretchers. Kendal and I made ready with ours. The wounded were being brought out of every house they were in.

A Belgian Colonel rode past us, trying to look unaware that he was retreating. He shouted to us to clear out of it. This was the only sign of interest that he showed.

Somebody else came up to Jevons and told him that there were three or four wounded men somewhere inside the Town Hall, but that the place was on fire and it was absolutely impossible to get them out. He advised us to pick up the men who were lying in the street, and clear out.

I saw Jevons nod his head as if he agreed and consented. I saw him get out of the car. And then I heard Kendal say, "Give us a hand, sir," and I turned to my stretchers.

When I looked round again Jevons was running towards the Town Hall. The man who had told us to pick up our wounded and clear out was looking after him with a face of the most perfect horror.

Kendal and I followed with the stretchers, and we saw Jevons run up the steps of the Town Hall. He turned at the top of the steps and waved to us to keep back.

Then he went through the big doors between the pillars.

There was a crash and a roar as if the whole building had fallen in. It was the top story plunging to the second floor. The upper half of the Town Hall was like a crate filled with blazing straw. The Greek pediment was the only solid thing that subsisted in that fire.

Then the first floor was caught. It burned more slowly.

Kendal and I and the ambulance men ran forward with the stretchers. And Jimmy came through the doors carrying a wounded Frenchman. He went in again and came out with another Frenchman.

(The ground floor had begun to burn behind him.)

He went in a third time and came out with Reggie Thesiger.

He must have had to go further into the hall to find him, for it was a much longer business. We, Kendal and I, were down the street by the ambulance when they came out, and I didn't see that it was Reggie till I heard Kendal say, "Sir, that's Major Thesiger he's got!"

Reggie's arm was round Jimmy's shoulder and Jimmy's arm was round Reggie's waist. He half carried, half supported him. He came out in the middle of a cloud of smoke that hid him. The smoke was followed by a burst of fire and another crash and roar as the ceiling of the first story plunged to the ground floor.

With all this going on behind him Jevons paused on the top of the steps to readjust his burden to the descent. We heard afterwards that Reggie had said, "You'd better leave me, old man, and scoot. You can't do it."

It didn't look as if he could. But as we went back to them we saw that
Jevons had heaved Reggie over his shoulder and was carrying him down the
steps. He came very carefully and slowly, so that we had reached the Town
Hall before he had staggered to the last step.

As we pressed closer to help him he told us to get back if we didn't want the whole damned place down on the top of us.

We gave back and he followed us. I don't know how we got Reggie on to the stretcher—he had a piece of shell somewhere in his thigh—but we did it and ran with him to the ambulance. We had about a minute to do it in and no more.

And then the second shell came.

It hit the Greek pediment from behind, and we saw the two tall pillars that supported it stagger, snap like two sticks, and bend forwards, looking suddenly queer and corpulent in their fore-shortening; then they parted and fell, bringing down the whole front of the Town Hall.

The Town Hall was spreading itself over the street, with a noise like a ship's coal going down the shute in a thunderstorm, as Reggie's stretcher slid home along its grooves in the ambulance. Kendal and I were inside for a second or two doing things for Reggie. The engine throbbed. The whole ambulance shook with its throbbing.

In that second Jevons had run back to fetch his car, calling out to us to cut and he would overtake us. He had cranked up his engines and jumped in before Kendal could get down and go to his help. When we saw him start we started. There wasn't any time to lose.

Kendal and I were sitting on the back steps of the ambulance, so that we kept him in sight. It was quite certain that he would overtake us.

* * * * *

He was running straight down the middle of the road when the third shell came.

It burst on the ground behind him, on his right, a little to one side.
Some of it must have struck the steering gear.

The car plunged to the left. It climbed reeling to the top of a bank and paused there, then fell, front over back, into the ditch and lay there, belly uppermost, and its wheels whirling in the air.

Jevons lay on his face, half in, half out of the ditch.

He lay for about three seconds; then, as we ran to him, we saw him raise himself on his left arm and crawl out of the ditch; and when we reached him he was trying to stand.

And he tried to smile at us. "You needn't look like that," he said. "I'm as right as rain." And then he tried to raise his right arm.

You saw a khaki cuff, horribly stained. A red rag hung from it, a fringe that dripped.

* * * * *

Reggie opened his eyes and turned his face towards the stretcher that slid into its grooves beside him.

"That isn't—Jimmy—is it?" he said.

I saw him move his left hand to find Jimmy's right. And I heard Jimmy saying again (in a weak voice this time) that he was as right as rain.

We had got out of the range of the guns and the surgeons had done their business with bandages and splints. They had taken Reggie first, then Jimmy.

And so, lying beside Reggie, on his own stretcher and in his own ambulance, he was brought back to Ghent.

The military hospitals were full, so we took them to the Convent de Saint
Pierre. And I went over to the Hôtel de la Poste to fetch Viola.

I don't know what I said to her. I think I must have done what Jimmy told me and said they were all right. She never said a word till we got to the Convent. (She told me afterwards that when she saw me coming in alone she had been sure that Jimmy was killed. She didn't know about Reggie yet, you see.)

This part of it is all confused and horrible.

We had to wait before we could see our surgeons at the Convent. The nuns took us into a little parlour and left us there.

And I told her then what had happened. I can see her sitting in the nuns' parlour, looking out of the window as I told her; looking as if she wasn't listening. And I can hear my own voice. It sounded strange and affected, as if I had made it all up and didn't believe what I was telling her.

"He saved Reggie's life—do you see? at the risk of his own.

"At—the risk—of his own."

And still she looked as if she wasn't listening. It didn't sound as if it had really happened.

And I feel—now—as if I had taken hours to tell her.

Then one of our men came to us. He drew back when he saw Mrs. Jevons, and
I followed him to the doorway. He said they were busy with Major
Thesiger. They hadn't started yet with Mr. Jevons.

And then—ages afterwards—one of the surgeons came and called me out of the room. He said the Major would be all right. They'd got the bit of shell out. But—there was Jevons's hand. They'd have to take it off. They couldn't possibly save it. And it was going to be a beastly business. They'd run out of anaesthetics. Thesiger had had the last they'd got.

Yes, of course it would have been better. But Jevons wouldn't hear of it. He knew they were short and Thesiger didn't, and he'd insisted on their doing Thesiger first.

It was an awful mistake, he said, because it would hurt Jevons ten times more than it would hurt anybody else. He thought that I had better get Mrs. Jevons out of that room; the ward where they were operating was next to it.

I couldn't get her out of it.

There were five minutes when I sat there and Viola crouched on the floor beside me with her face hidden on my knees and her hands grabbing me tighter and tighter.

And the door opened and I saw two nuns looking in. I heard one say to another, "C'est sa pauvre femme qui devient folle." And the door closed on us.

* * * * *

"All that fuss about a hand!" Jimmy had come out of his faint and was trying to restore Viola to a sense of proportion. If all the rest of him had been blown away, he said, by that confounded shell, and only his hand had been left, she might have had something to cry for.

And yet she cried inconsolably for Jimmy's hand.

God knows what memories came to her when she thought of it. I don't think she thought of it as the hand that had written masterpieces and flung them aside, that could steer a car straight through hell-fire, and that could nurse, and bind up wounds. I know I thought of all these obvious things. But she must have thought of the hand that she knew like her own hand, the hand with the firm, nervous fingers, and the three strong lines in the pinkish palm, the hand she adored and had shrunk from, whose gesture had been torture to her and whose touch was ecstasy, the hand that the surgeons had cut off and tossed into a basket to be cast out with the refuse of the wards.

Not that either of us had much time for thinking of anything but how we could get out of Ghent before the Germans got into it. Viola said it would be quite easy. There was the ambulance, and there was her car and there was Jimmy's car.

I told her that Jimmy's god-like car was lying bottom upwards in a ditch between Ghent and Melle, an object half piteous, half obscene. She said it was a jolly good thing then that she'd brought hers. Perhaps it was.

We had just got Jimmy and Reggie into their first sleep at six o'clock in the morning when the orders came for us to clear out.

We cleared out in Viola's car, with Reggie on his stretcher and Jimmy (propped up with pillows) at his head, and Viola at his feet, and two wounded men in front with Colville, and Kendal and me standing one on each step. (Most of our luggage was on the Boulevard in front of the Convent where we had left it.)

We went, as we had come, through Bruges. We drew up to rest in the Market
Place under the Belfry.

"You'd better look at it while you can, Viola," said Jevons. "You may never see it again."

"I? I shall never see anything else," she said.

We looked at the Belfry. It was as if, under that menace of destruction, we saw it for the first time.

We might have enjoyed that run back, Viola said; only somehow we didn't. Reggie was ill from his anesthetic all the way, and Jimmy's temperature went up with every mile, and we missed the boat at Ostend, and had to stay there all night; and Jimmy became delirious in the night and thought that he had left Viola behind in the Town Hall at Melle. And there was no room on the morning boat; and when we did get on board the Naval Transport at Dunkirk, Kendal took it into his head to be seasick till he nearly died.

We had no peace till seven o'clock on Tuesday, when we got to Canterbury.