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.