“Does it strike you,” he said, “that Billy isn’t very keen?”

“No.  It doesn’t.  What do you mean?”

“I notice that he’s jolly glad when he can get an indoor job.”

“That’s because they’re short of surgeons.  He only wants to do what’s most useful.”

“I didn’t say he had cold feet.”

“Of course he hasn’t.  Billy would go to Antwerp like a shot if they’d let him.  He feels just as we do about it.  That’s why he got up and went away.”

“He’d go.  But he wouldn’t enjoy it.”

“Oh, don’t talk about ‘enjoying.’”

“Sharlie, you don’t mean to say that you’re not keen?”

“No.  It’s only that I don’t care as much as I did about what you call the romance of it; and I do care more about the solid work.  It seems to me that it doesn’t matter who does it so long as it’s done.”

“I’d very much rather I did it than McClane.  So would you.”

“Yes.  I would.  But I’d be sorry if poor little Mac didn’t get any of it.  And all the time I know it doesn’t matter which of us it is.  It doesn’t matter whether we’re in danger or out of danger, or whether we’re in the big thing or a little one.”

“Don’t you want to be in the big thing?”

“Yes.  I want.  But I know my wanting doesn’t matter.  I don’t matter.  None of us matters.”

That was how she felt about it now that it had come to defeat, now that Antwerp was falling.  Yesterday they, she and John, had been vivid entities, intensely real, living and moving in the war as in a containing space that was real enough, since it was there, but real like hell or heaven or God, not to be grasped or felt in its reality; only the stretch of it that they covered was real, the roads round Ghent, the burning villages, the places where they served, Berlaere and Melle, Quatrecht and Zele; the wounded men.  Yesterday her thoughts about John had mattered, her doubt and fear of him and her pain; her agony of desire that he should be, should be always, what she loved him for being; and her final certainty had been the one important, the one real thing.  To-day she had difficulty in remembering all that, as if they hadn’t really been.  To-day they were unimportant to themselves and to each other; small, not quite real existences, enveloped by an immense reality that closed in on them; alive; black, palpitating defeat.  It made nothing of them, of their bodies nothing but the parts they worked with:  feet and hands.  Nothing mattered, nothing existed but the war, and the armies, the Belgian army, beaten.

Antwerp was falling.  And afterwards it would be Ghent, and then Ostend.  And then there would be no more Belgium.

But John wouldn’t hear of it.  Ghent wouldn’t fall.

“It won’t fall because it isn’t a fortified city,” she objected.  “But it’ll surrender.  It’ll have to.”

“It won’t.  If the Germans come anywhere near we shall drive them back.”