The door of the house opened a little way; they slipped into the long narrow room lighted by a few oil lamps at one end.  At the other John’s body lay on a stretcher set up on a trestle table, his feet turned outwards to the door, ready.  The corners at this end were so dark that the body seemed to stretch across the whole width of the room.  A soldier came forward with a lighted candle and gave it to McClane.  And she saw John’s face; the bridge of his nose, with its winged nostrils lifted.  His head was tilted upwards at the chin; that gave it a noble look.  His mouth was open, ever so slightly open ...  McClane shifted the light so that it fell on his forehead....  Black eyebrows curling up like little moustaches....  The half-dropped eyelids guarded the dead eyes.

She thought of how he used to dream.  All his dream was in his dead face; his dead face was cold and beautiful like his dream.

As she looked at him her breast closed down on her heart as though it would never lift again; her breath shuddered there under her tightened throat.  She could feel McClane’s hand pressing heavily on her shoulder.  She had no strength to shake it off; she was even glad of it.  She felt small and weak and afraid; afraid, not of the beautiful thing that lay there, but of something terrible and secret that it hid, something that any minute she would have to know about.

“Where was he hit?”

“In the back.”

She trembled and McClane’s hand pressed closer.  “The bullet passed clean through his heart.  He didn’t suffer.”

“He was getting in Germans?”

“I don’t—­quite—­know—­” McClane measured his words out one by one, “what—­he was doing.  Sutton was with him.  He knows.”

“Where is Billy?”

“Over there.  Do you want him?”

“Not yet.”

A soldier brought a chair for her.  She sat down with her back to the trestle table.  At the lighted end of the room she saw Sutton stooping over a young Belgian captain, buttoning his tunic under the sling he had adjusted.  The captain’s face showed pure and handsome, like a girl’s, like a young nun’s, bound round and chin-wrapped in the white bandages.  He sat on the floor in front of Sutton’s table with his legs stretched out flat.  His back was propped against the thigh of a Belgian soldier seated on an upturned barrel.  Her hurt eyes saw them very plain and with detail in the light of Sutton’s lamp.

That part of the room was full of soldiers.  She noticed that they kept clear of the trestle table as they went in and out.  Only one of them, the soldier who supported the young captain, kept on looking, raising his head and looking there as if he couldn’t turn his eyes away.  He faced her.  His rifle stood steadied by his knees, the bayonet pointing up between his eyes.

She found herself thinking.  It was Sutton’s back that made her think.  John must have been stooping over the German like that.  John’s wound was in his back.  But if he was stooping it couldn’t have come that way.  The bullet would have gone through his chest....  Perhaps he had turned to pick up his stretcher.  Billy was there.  He would tell her how it had happened.