."

"Of course there's killing. If a man's willing to be killed he's jolly
well earned his right to kill. It's the same for the other johnnie. If
your life doesn't matter a hang, his doesn't either. He's got his
feeling. He's got his romance. If he hasn't--"

"Yes--if he hasn't?"

"He's better dead."

"Oh no; he might simply go slogging on without feeling anything, from a
sense of duty. That would be beautiful; it would be _the_ most
beautiful thing."

"There you are, then. His duty's his romance. You can't get away from
it."

"No."

But she thought: Supposing he went, loathing it, shivering, sick?
Frightened. Well, of course it would be there too, simply because he
_went_; only you would feel it, not he.

Supposing he didn't go, supposing he stuck, and had to be pushed on, by
bayonets, from behind? It didn't bear thinking of.

John hadn't thought of it. He wouldn't. He couldn't see that some people
were like that.

"I don't envy," he said, "the chaps who come out to soft jobs in
this war."

They had found the little man in tweeds asleep behind the engine house,
his chin sunk on his chest, his hands folded on his stomach. He had taken
off his green velvet hat, and a crest of greyish hair rose up from his
bald forehead, light and fine.

* * * * *

The sun was setting now. The foam of the wake had the pink tinge of red
wine spilt on a white cloth; a highway of gold and rose, edged with
purple, went straight from it to the sun.

After the sunset, land, the sunk lines of the Flemish coast.

There was a stir among the passengers; they plunged into the cabins and
presently returned, carrying things. The groups sorted themselves, the
Commission people standing apart with their air of arrogance and
distinction. The little man in tweeds had waked up from his sleep behind
the engine house, and strolled with a sort of dreamy swagger to his place
at their head. Everybody moved over to the starboard side.

They stood there in silence watching the white walls and domes and towers
of Ostend. Charlotte and Conway had moved close to each other. She looked
up into his face, searching his thoughts there. Suddenly from somewhere
in the bows a song spurted and dropped and spurted again and shot up in
the stillness, slender and clear, like a rod oft white water. The Belgian
boys were singing the Marseillaise. On the deck their feet beat out the
thud of the march.

Charlotte looked away.