"Do you know that Antwerp's over there, a little way to the north? And that they've dragged up the big guns from Namur for the siege of Antwerp?"
"Oh, Wally—have they?"
She turned her face to the north as if she thought she could see or hear the siege-guns.
"But you said Jimmy was in Ghent."
"Jimmy," I said, "is probably in Ghent. If he isn't, he's in Antwerp. Do you know that the battlefields are down there—no—there—to the south, where I'm pointing? There's fighting going on there now."
She said, "Yes, dear, I know, I know," very gently; and she put her hand on my knee, as if she recognized the war as my private tragedy and was sorry for me. Then she fell back to her brooding.
Somewhere on the great flagged road between Bruges and Ecloo we met a straggling train of refugees—old men and women and children, bent double under their enormous bundles, making for Bruges and Ostend. They stared, not at us, but at the road in front of them, with a dreadful apathy, as we passed.
"This," I said, "is what finishes me—every time I see it."
She said nothing.
"Do you realize," I said, "that those women and those little children are flying for their lives? That they've come, doubled up like that, for miles—from Termonde or Alost? That they've lost everything they ever had?" (I can hear my own voice beating out the horror of it in hard, cruel jerks.) "That their homes—their homes—are burned to ashes somewhere down there?"