The Commandant has arranged to stay at Ecloo for a few hours. Some friends there have offered him their house. The wounded are to be put up at the Convent. Ecloo is about half-way between Ghent and Bruges.
We start. Tom's car goes first with the Belgian soldier in front. Ursula Dearmer, Mrs. Lambert, Miss Ashley-Smith and Mr. Riley and I are inside. The Commandant sits, silent, wrapped in meditation, on the step.
We are not going so very fast, not faster than the three cars behind us, and the slowest of the three (the Fiat with the hard tyres, carrying the baggage) sets the pace. We must keep within their sight or they may lose their way. But though we are not really going fast, the speed seems intolerable, especially the speed that swings us out of sight of the "Flandria." You think that is the worst. But it isn't. The speed with its steady acceleration grows more intolerable with every mile. Your sense of safety grows intolerable.
You never knew that safety could hurt like this.
Somewhere on this road the Belgian Army has gone before us. We have got to go with it. We have had our orders.
That thought consoles you, but not for long. You may call it following the Belgian Army. But the Belgian Army is retreating, and you are retreating with it. There is nothing else you can do; but that does not make it any better. And this speed of the motor over the flat roads, this speed that cuts the air, driving its furrow so fast that the wind rushes by you like strong water, this speed that so inspired and exalted you when it brought you into Flanders, when it took you to Antwerp and Baerlaere and Lokeren and Melle, this vehement and frightful and relentless speed is the thing that beats you down and tortures you. For several hours, ever since you had your orders to pack up and go, you have been working with no other purpose than this going; you have contemplated it many times with equanimity, with indifference; you knew all along that it was not possible to stay in Ghent for ever; and when you were helping to get the wounded into the ambulances you thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to get in yourself and go with them; when you had time to think about it you were even aware of looking forward with pleasure to the thrill of a clean run before the Germans. You never thought, and nobody could possibly have told you, that it would be like this.
I never thought, and nobody could possibly have told me, that I was going to behave as I did then.
The thing began with the first turn of the road that hid the "Flandria." Up till that moment, whatever I may have felt about the people we had to leave behind us, as long as none of our field-women were left behind, I had not the smallest objection to being saved myself. And if it had occurred to me to stay behind for the sake of one man who couldn't be moved and who had the best surgeon in the Hospital and the pick of the nursing-staff to look after him, I think I should have disposed of the idea as sheer sentimentalism. When I was with him to-night I could think of nothing but the wounded in the Couvent de Saint Pierre. And afterwards there had been so much to do.
And now that there was nothing more to do, I couldn't think of anything but that one man.
The night before came back to me in a vision, or rather an obsession, infinitely more present, more visible and palpable than this night that we were living in. The light with the red shade hung just over my head on my right hand; the blond walls were round me; they shut me in alone with the wounded man who lay stretched before me on the bed. And the moments were measured by the rhythm of his breathing, and by the closing and opening of his eyes.