And when he’d finished he told us that Antwerp had fallen.

That was how Jevons came to write the story of the Fall of Antwerp instead of me.

Well, he didn’t sack Colville; and he didn’t get me packed off with the other war-correspondents who left Ghent in a body the next day.  And he said nothing about sending Viola away.  He did better than that.  He told her he had brought Charlie Thesiger from Antwerp yesterday, and that her cousin was dying in the Couvent de Saint Pierre, and that perhaps it would be a bit easier for him if she were with him.

We took her to the convent that morning.  On the way there she asked Jimmy why he hadn’t told her about Charlie yesterday.  He said that up till midnight we weren’t absolutely certain that Charlie wouldn’t recover, and that she was safer with us in the hotel than she would be away from us in the convent.

“My safety is to be considered before everything?” she said.

He answered that it was surely enough for her if he risked it now.

I can’t think why she didn’t see through him.  I and Kendal and Colville knew perfectly well that he was taking her to the convent to be safe.  I think he argued that if she had poor Charlie to look after it would keep her quiet, and she would be out of mischief till it was time for the Germans to march into Ghent.

So we took her to him.

We found him in a little whitewashed cell that one of the sisters had given up to him.  He lay under a crucifix on the nun’s narrow bed, which was too short for him, so that his naked feet showed through the blankets at the bottom.  The naked feet of the Christ pointed downwards to his head.

He had been shot through the lungs and was dying of pneumonia, sending out his breath in fierce, rapid jerks.

He lay on his side with his back towards us, and his face was hidden from us as we came in.

The sister who sat with him made a sign that said, “Oh yes, you can come in, all of you; it will make no difference.”

The cell was so small that Jevons and I had to draw back and let Viola go in by herself.  We two stood in the doorway and looked in.  After the first glance at the bed—­it was enough for me—­I looked, I couldn’t help looking, at Viola, (Jevons, I noticed, kept his eyes fixed on the body of the dying man.) I heard her catch her breath in a sob before she could have seen him.

He had slipped his blankets from his shoulder, and it was the sight of his back—­under the half-open hospital shirt which showed the bandages and dressings of his wound—­that upset her; his back that might have been any man’s back, the innocent back that she had no memory of, that disguised and hid him from her and made him strange to her and utterly pathetic.  And then, there was the back of his head, sunk like lead into his pillow.  The cropped hair had begun to grow.  You could see a little greyish tuft.  You wouldn’t have known that it was Charlie’s head.