“If you’ll only trust me, Wally,” she said the first day we started, when all the correspondents in the hotel had turned out to see us off, “you’ll find that I’m your Providence and not your curse.  I can get you through where you’d never get yourself.  Just look at those men how sick they are.”

I said I thought it would be only decent to take two or three of them with us.  We had room.

But Viola was firm.  She said it would be most indecent.  We should want all the room we had for our wounded.

“Do you suppose I’m going to chivy Jimmy about without doing anything to help him?  As for you, you’ve only to sit tight and do what you’re told.  You’ll be all right as long as we follow Jimmy.”

And so we followed him.  My God, what a chase!  But Viola’s little chauffeur was game and we followed.  Though Jimmy had made elaborate arrangements for stopping his wife’s progress at least two miles outside the danger-zone she always managed to get through.  Sentries, colonels, army medical officers—­she twisted them into coils round her little finger, and cast them from her and got through.  And once through, we were really quite useful in transporting wounded.  Jevons and I between us managed to keep her out of the actual firing-line by telling her she was in all of it there was; and when we were loaded up with wounded there was no difficulty in getting her away.

And certainly it served my turn well enough.  Though I was compelled to see the war through Jimmy, I saw the war.

By the end of our first week Jimmy seemed to get used to being followed as a matter of course.  We had followed him to Alost and Termonde and Quatrecht and Zele.  When we weren’t following him we were near him somewhere, working at the dressing-stations or among the refugees.

Then he did a mean thing.  He managed to get himself sent to Antwerp for three days.  He sneaked off there by himself on the Sunday, and when we tried to follow him we were turned back at Saint Nicolas, just too late to see the British go through.  He had worked it this time.

When he got back from Antwerp at the end of his three days we knew that something had happened, something that he was keeping from us.  It wasn’t only the fate of Antwerp that was hanging over him, as it hung over all of us in that awful second week.  It was as if he had seen something intimate and terrible that he couldn’t talk about.

That night after Viola had gone to her room he told me what had happened.  He had seen Charlie Thesiger’s regiment at Saint Nicolas on Sunday.  And to-day—­which was Tuesday—­he had seen Charlie Thesiger.  He had found him lying dangerously wounded in the British Hospital at Antwerp.  That, he said, was what had kept him there.  And he had brought him back with him to Ghent.  He was in the Couvent de Saint Pierre.

He thought, perhaps, it would be better not to tell Viola just yet.  Charlie didn’t know, he said, that she was here.