she said, that it would work quite well.

It did. It worked better than if I had gone halves with the other
correspondents. For at this time war-correspondents were not greatly
loved by the military authorities, and they were having considerable
difficulty in getting near anything, and the time, Jimmy said, was
coming when they would be cleared neck and crop out of Belgium. My astute
sister-in-law had calculated on all this and on her own part in it.

"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 throug