And when we tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo, the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble.  There wouldn’t be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said.  “There won’t be any Waterloo for another two years, if then.”

He wasn’t always lugubrious.  It was only when he thought that he was missing the Siege of Antwerp that his happiness was incomplete.

It was on our third morning, when he rushed off joyously (to Quatrecht, I think), that I said to Viola, “You thought it would hurt him more than other people.  You needn’t have come out after him.  You see how much it’s hurting him.”

“I’m glad I came,” she said.  “I don’t mind as long as I can see.”

“Do you remember him telling Reggie that he wouldn’t be in the war because he was a coward?  Don’t you wish Reggie could see him now?”

She didn’t answer, and I saw that there was still a sting for her in Reggie’s name.  The war might have made her forgive him, but there were things that the war couldn’t wipe out from her memory.  And there was her own rather appalling injustice to Jimmy.  I wondered whether she was thinking of how she had tried to stop his going to the front, and how she had said he didn’t want to go.

But I had to own that she had done the best thing for her peace of mind by coming out.

My peace of mind, I was told quite frankly, didn’t matter.  Jevons, though he admitted that I couldn’t have stopped her coming out, made me responsible for her presence at the seat of war.  The trouble was that she insisted on following him wherever he went.  And as it wasn’t to be expected that he would take her with him into the tight places that he managed to get into in his own car, I had to have her in mine.  Not that Viola consented to my putting it that way.  It was clear that she made herself mistress of the situation when she obtained possession of that car and manoeuvred (as I am convinced she did manoeuvre) for my own failure with the firm that supplied it.  On our first morning in Ghent we came to what she called an understanding, when she rubbed it well into me that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out, and that the man was under her orders, not mine.  If I liked to come with her, why, of course I could.  Otherwise, I could go halves with one of the other correspondents in one of their cars.  But she pointed out that I could hardly do better than come with her, for by simply following Jimmy I should get nearer to the firing-line than anybody else. (She had assumed that the firing-line was the goal of every war-correspondent’s ambition.) I would find, she said, that it would work quite well.

It did.  It worked better than if I had gone halves with the other correspondents.  For at this time war-correspondents were not greatly loved by the military authorities, and they were having considerable difficulty in getting near anything, and the time, Jimmy said, was coming when they would be cleared neck and crop out of Belgium.  My astute sister-in-law had calculated on all this and on her own part in it.