, of course it would have been better. But Jevons wouldn't hear of it.
_He_ knew they were short and Thesiger didn't, and he'd insisted on their
doing Thesiger first.

It was an awful mistake, he said, because it would hurt Jevons ten times
more than it would hurt anybody else. He thought that I had better get
Mrs. Jevons out of that room; the ward where they were operating was next
to it.

I couldn't get her out of it.

There were five minutes when I sat there and Viola crouched on the floor
beside me with her face hidden on my knees and her hands grabbing me
tighter and tighter.

And the door opened and I saw two nuns looking in. I heard one say to
another, "_C'est sa pauvre femme qui devient folle_." And the door closed
on us.

* * * * *

"All that fuss about a hand!" Jimmy had come out of his faint and was
trying to restore Viola to a sense of proportion. If all the rest of him
had been blown away, he said, by that confounded shell, and only his hand
had been left, she might have had something to cry for.

And yet she cried inconsolably for Jimmy's hand.

God knows what memories came to her when she thought of it. I don't think
she thought of it as the hand that had written masterpieces and flung
them aside, that could steer a car straight through hell-fire, and that
could nurse, and bind up wounds. I know I thought of all these obvious
things. But she must have thought of the hand that she knew like her own
hand, the hand with the firm, nervous fingers, and the three strong lines
in the pinkish palm, the hand she adored and had shrunk from, whose
gesture had been torture to her and whose touch was ecstasy, the hand
that the surgeons had cut off and tossed into a basket to be cast out
with the refuse of the wards.

Not that either of us had much time for thinking of anything but how we
could get out of Ghent before the Germans got into it. Viola said it
would be quite easy. There was the ambulance, and there was _her_ car and
there was Jimmy's car.

I told her that Jimmy's god-like car was lying bottom upwards in a ditch
between Ghent and Melle, an object half piteous, half obscene. She said
it was a jolly good thing then that she'd brought hers. Perhaps it was.

We had just got Jimmy and Reggie into their first sleep at six o'clock in
the morning when the orders came for us to clear out.

We cleared out in Viola's car, with Reggie on his stretcher and Jimmy
(propped up