"If I were to stick there, doing nothing, looking at the wounded, I should go off my head."
"My God! So should I. Those everlasting wounds. They make you dream about them. Disgusting dreams. I never really see the wound, but I'm just going to see it. I know it's going to be more horrible than any wound I've ever seen. And then I wake.... That's why I don't look at them more than I can help."
"You're looking at them now," she said.
"Oh, them. That's nothing. Cotton wool."
And she, putting her hand on his arm to draw him up the stairs, away. John shaking her hands off and his queer voice rising. "I wish you wouldn't do that, Charlotte. You know I hate it."
He had never said anything to her like that before. It hadn't struck her before that, changed to himself, he would change to her. He hadn't got over last night. She had hurt him; her knowledge of his cowardice hurt him; and this was how he showed his pain.
She thought: Here's Antwerp falling and Belgium beaten. And all those wounded. And the dead.... And here am I, bothering about these little things, as if they mattered. Three little things.
* * * * *
The fire from the battlefield had raked the village street as they came in; but it had ceased now. The curé had been through it all, going up and down, helping with the stretchers. John was down there in the wine-shop, where the soldiers were, looking for more wounded.
They had found five in the stable yard, waiting to be taken away; they had moved four of them into the ambulance. The fifth, shot through the back of his head, still lay on the ground on a stretcher that dripped blood. Charlotte stood beside him.
The curé came to her there. He was slender and lean in his black cassock. He had a Red Cross brassard on his sleeve, and in one hand he carried his missal and in the other the Host and the holy oils in a little bag of purple silk. He looked down at the stretcher and he looked at Charlotte, smiling faintly.
"Where is Monsieur?" he said.
"In the wine-shop, looking for wounded."
She thought: He isn't looking, for them. He's skulking there, out of the firing. He'll always be like that.
It had begun again. The bullets whistled in the air and rapped on the stone causeway, and ceased. The curé glanced down the street towards the place they had come from and smiled again.