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?”

At my last jerk she turned.

“No,” she said.  “I’m cold and hard and stupid, and I do not realize it.  Neither do you.  If either of us realized it for two seconds we should be either cutting our throats in that ditch or going back to Ostend now with a load of those women and children, instead of tearing past them like devils in this damned car.

“I can’t realize anything till I know whether Jimmy’s all right or not.  I can’t see anything, or feel anything, or think of anything but Jimmy.  Bruges is Jimmy and Belgium is Jimmy and the whole war is Jimmy—­to me.  I don’t care if you are horrified.  I can’t help it if I am callous.  It is so.  And you can’t make it different.”

I remember saying quite abjectly that I was sorry—­that I was only trying to turn her mind to other things as a relief.

“I’m to turn my mind to that—­as a relief!”

She showed me a woman I was trying not to see, a woman who carried the bedding of her household on her back and dragged a four-year-old child by the hand.  The child slipped to its knees at every other yard, and at every other yard was pulled up whimpering and dragged again—­not with anger or any emotion whatever, but with a sickening repetition, as if its mother’s arm was a mechanism set going to pull and drag.

If ever there was a weathercock it was my sister-in-law.  Without even pretending to consult me, she made Colville, the chauffeur, turn the car round. (He was her chauffeur, after all, she said.)

“I don’t know,” she said, “whether I realize that woman or not, or whether you do.  But I’m going to take her into Bruges.”