ng
nothing. She had fretted at the stupidity which had sent them where they
were not wanted. But here there were not enough hands for the stretchers,
and Charlotte was wanted every second of the time. From the first minute
you could see what you were in for.

The retreat.

And for an instant, in the blind rush and confusion of it, she had lost
sight of John. She had turned the car round and left it with its nose
pointing towards Ghent. Trixie Rankin and the McClane men were at the
front cars taking out the stretchers; John and McClane were going up the
road. She had got out her own stretcher and was following them when the
battery came tearing down the road and cut them off. It tore headlong,
swerving and careening with great rattling and crashing noises. She could
see the faces of the men, thrown back, swaying; there was no terror in
them, only a sort of sullen anger and resentment.

She stood on the narrow sandy track beside the causeway to let it pass,
and when a gap came in the train she dashed through to get to John. And
John was not there. When all the artillery had passed he was not there;
only McClane, going on up the middle of the street by himself.

She ran after him and asked him what had happened to John. He turned,
dreamy and deliberate, utterly unperturbed. John, he said, had gone on to
look for a wounded man who was said to have been taken into one of those
houses there, on the right, in the lane. She went down the lane with her
stretcher and McClane waited for them at the top. The doors of the houses
were open; Flemish women stood outside, looking up to the street. There
was one house with a shut door, a tall green door; she thought that would
be the one that John had gone into. She rapped and he opened the door and
came striding out, holding his head high. He shut the door quietly and
looked at her, an odd look, piercing and grave.

"Dead," he said.

And when McClane met them he said it again, "Dead."

The wounded were being brought down from Lokeren in trams that ran on to
a siding behind a little fir plantation outside the village. At the wide
top of the street a table of boards and trestles stood by the foot track,
and the stretchers were laid on it as they came in, and the wounded had
their first bandaging and dressings there. McClane took up his place by
this table, and the stretcher bearers went backwards and forwards between
the village and the plantation.

Beyond the plantation the flag