And this is only the beginning. After Marie comes Janet McNeil. She, poor child, has surrendered to the overpowering assault on her feelings and has pledged herself to smuggle the four young children of Madame —— into the ambulance somehow. I don't see how it was possible for her to endure the agony of refusing this request. But what we are to do with four young children in cars packed with wounded soldiers, through all the stages of the Belgian Army's retreat—!
The next problem that faced me was the Commandant's packing—how to get all the things he had brought with him into one small Gladstone bag and a sleeping-sack. There was a blue serge suit, two sleeping-suits, a large Burberry, a great many pocket-handkerchiefs, socks and stockings, an assortment of neckties, a quantity of small miscellaneous objects whose fugitive tendencies he proposed to frustrate by confinement in a large tin biscuit-box; there was the biscuit-box itself, a tobacco tin, a packet of Gillette razors, a pipe, a leather case containing some electric apparatus, and a fat scarlet volume: Freud's "Psychopathology of Everyday Life." All these things he had pointed out to me as they lay flung on the bed or strewn about the room. He had impressed on me the absolute necessity of packing every one of them, and by the pathetic grouping around the Gladstone bag of the biscuit-box, the tobacco-tin, the case of instruments and Freud, I gathered that he believed that they would all enter the bag placably and be contained in it with ease.
The night is still young.
I pack the Gladstone bag. By alternate coaxing and coercion Freud and the tobacco-tin and the biscuit-box occupy it amicably enough; but the case of instruments offers an unconquerable resistance.
The night is not quite so young as it has been, and I think I must have left off packing to run over to the Hôtel Cecil and pay my bill; for I remember going out into the Place and seeing a crowd drawn up in the middle of it before the "Flandria." An official was addressing this crowd, ordering them to give up their revolvers and any arms they had on them.
The fate of Ghent depends on absolute obedience to this order.
When I get back I find Mrs. Torrence downstairs in the hall of the "Flandria." I ask her what we had better do about our refugee children. She says we can do nothing. There must be no refugee children. How can there be in an ambulance packed with wounded men? When I tell her that the children will certainly be there if somebody doesn't do something to stop them, she goes off to do it. I do not envy her her job. She is not enjoying it herself. First of all she has got to break it to Janet. And Janet will have to break it to the mother.
As to poor Marie, she is out of the question. I shall have to break it to Marie.
The night goes on. I sit with Mr. —— for a little while. I have still to finish the Commandant's packing; I have not yet begun my own, and it is time that I should go round to the Convent to tell Miss Ashley-Smith to be ready with her British before two o'clock.
I sit with him for what seems a very long time. It is appalling to me that the time should seem long. For it is really such a little while, and when it is over there will be nothing more that I shall ever do for him. This thought is not prominent and vivid; it is barely discernible; but it is there, a dull background of pain under my anxiety for the safety of the English over there in the Couvent de Saint Pierre. It is more than time that I should go and tell them to be ready.