(She has told me that it’s all right, so long as I recognize that it was devotion.)

After Lokeren I had no desire to go through the rest of the war with Jimmy.  To be with Jimmy was destruction to your sense of values.  I have got it firmly fixed in my head that the taking of Lokeren was an important affair.

As for what Jimmy called the “tinpot bombardment of Melle” (there was nothing wrong with his sense of values), I shall see it insanely, for ever and ever, as the event of the war.

And there is this to be said, that Lokeren filled the last gap in the line closing round Ghent, north, south and east, and drew it tighter.  And Melle (only four and a-half miles away) was the last point in the German advance on Ghent.  The taking of Melle would be a sign to us that the game was up.

For three days Jimmy operated joyously in the village and over the leagues of turnip-fields that lay outside it.

Of the first two days I remember an endless tramping over endless furrows that were ditches for the dead; an endless staggering under stretchers that dripped blood; an endless struggling with Viola to keep her under shelter of the walls; each of those acts seemed to be endless, though one gave place to the other, and it was only the firing that went on all the time, till even Jimmy complained once or twice that he was fed up with it.

I remember that Jimmy’s Field Ambulance played a great part in these adventures.  I remember feeling a malicious satisfaction in the thought that at the same time it was compelled to witness his performances.  It couldn’t miss him.

I remember all these things; but of Melle itself I remember nothing but the Town Hall, with its double flight of steps up to its door, and the two tall stone pillars, one on each side of the door, and the Greek pediment above it; that and the little old Flemish house that stood back by itself on the other side of the road, and its white walls and its red-tiled roof, and the two green poplars in its garden, mounting guard.  The house and its garden and its poplars are always vivid and still; they always appear to me as charged with mystery and significance and as connected in some secret way with Jimmy’s fate.

In the pauses of our movements the Field Ambulance and Jimmy’s car and Viola’s were always drawn up before the Town Hall, facing the little house.

Then came Sunday, the eleventh, the third day of Melle, when Viola was left behind at Ghent.

Jimmy had made her promise on her honour to be brave, this time, and stay in the hotel and wait for orders.

Colville stayed with her.  They were to pack our things and be ready to leave at a minute’s notice.  Colville had secret orders that, if we were not back by midnight, he was to take Viola on to Bruges in his car, and wait for us there.

For we knew now that we were in for it.