is retreating, and you are
retreating with it. There is nothing else you can do; but that does not
make it any better. And this speed of the motor over the flat roads,
this speed that cuts the air, driving its furrow so fast that the wind
rushes by you like strong water, this speed that so inspired and exalted
you when it brought you into Flanders, when it took you to Antwerp and
Baerlaere and Lokeren and Melle, this vehement and frightful and
relentless speed is the thing that beats you down and tortures you. For
several hours, ever since you had your orders to pack up and go, you
have been working with no other purpose than this going; you have
contemplated it many times with equanimity, with indifference; you knew
all along that it was not possible to stay in Ghent for ever; and when
you were helping to get the wounded into the ambulances you thought it
would be the easiest thing in the world to get in yourself and go with
them; when you had time to think about it you were even aware of looking
forward with pleasure to the thrill of a clean run before the Germans.
You never thought, and nobody could possibly have told you, that it
would be like this.

I never thought, and nobody could possibly have told me, that I was
going to behave as I did then.

The thing began with the first turn of the road that hid the "Flandria."
Up till that moment, whatever I may have felt about the people we had to
leave behind us, as long as none of our field-women were left behind, I
had not the smallest objection to being saved myself. And if it had
occurred to me to stay behind for the sake of one man who couldn't be
moved and who had the best surgeon in the Hospital and the pick of the
nursing-staff to look after him, I think I should have disposed of the
idea as sheer sentimentalism. When I was with him to-night I could think
of nothing but the wounded in the Couvent de Saint Pierre. And
afterwards there had been so much to do.

And now that there was nothing more to do, I couldn't think of anything
but that one man.

The night before came back to me in a vision, or rather an obsession,
infinitely more present, more visible and palpable than this night that
we were living in. The light with the red shade hung just over my head
on my right hand; the blond walls were round me; they shut me in alone
with the wounded man who lay stretched before me on the bed. And the
moments were measured by the rhythm of his breathing, and by the