It was the most revolting thing that had happened to me yet, in a life filled with incidents that I have no desire to repeat. And it made me turn on the Commandant in a way that I do not like to think of. I believe I asked him how he could bear to let that kid go into the German lines, which was exactly what the poor man hadn't done.[25]
Then we waited, Mrs. Lambert and I in Tom's car; and the Commandant in the car with Ursula Dearmer and the Chaplain on the other side of the street.
We were dreadfully silent now. We stared at objects that had no earthly interest for us as if our lives depended on mastering their detail. We were thus aware of a beautiful little Belgian house standing back from the village street down a short turning, a cream-coloured house with green shutters and a roof of rose-red tiles, and a very small poplar tree mounting guard beside it. This house and its tree were vivid and very still. They stood back in an atmosphere of their own, an atmosphere of perfect but utterly unreal peace. And as long as our memories endure, that house which we never saw before, and shall probably never see again, is bound up with the fate of Mrs. Torrence and Janet McNeil.
We thought we should have an hour to wait before they came back, if they ever did come. We waited for them during a whole dreadful lifetime.
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In something less than half an hour the military ambulance came swinging round the turn of the road, with Mrs. Torrence and the Kid, and the two German wounded with them on the stretchers.
Those Germans never thought that they were going to be saved. They couldn't get over it—that two Englishwomen should have gone through their fire, for them! As they were being carried through the fire they said: "We shall never forget what you've done for us. God will bless you for it."
Mrs. Torrence asked them, "What will you do for us if we are taken prisoner?"
And they said: "We will do all we can to save you."
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