rloo next week or the week after, he said. "There
won't be any Waterloo for another two years, if then."

He wasn't always lugubrious. It was only when he thought that he was
missing the Siege of Antwerp that his happiness was incomplete.

It was on our third morning, when he rushed off joyously (to Quatrecht, I
think), that I said to Viola, "You thought it would hurt him more than
other people. You needn't have come out after him. You see how much it's
hurting him."

"I'm glad I came," she said. "I don't mind as long as I can see."

"Do you remember him telling Reggie that he wouldn't be in the war
because he was a coward? Don't you wish Reggie could see him now?"

She didn't answer, and I saw that there was still a sting for her in
Reggie's name. The war might have made her forgive him, but there were
things that the war couldn't wipe out from her memory. And there was her
own rather appalling injustice to Jimmy. I wondered whether she was
thinking of how she had tried to stop his going to the front, and how she
had said he didn't want to go.

But I had to own that she had done the best thing for her peace of mind
by coming out.

_My_ peace of mind, I was told quite frankly, didn't matter. Jevons,
though he admitted that I couldn't have stopped her coming out, made me
responsible for her presence at the seat of war. The trouble was that she
insisted on following him wherever he went. And as it wasn't to be
expected that he would take her with him into the tight places that he
managed to get into in his own car, I had to have her in mine. Not that
Viola consented to my putting it that way. It was clear that she made
herself mistress of the situation when she obtained possession of that
car and manoeuvred (as I am convinced she did manoeuvre) for my own
failure with the firm that supplied it. On our first morning in Ghent we
came to what she called an understanding, when she rubbed it well into me
that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out,
and that the man was under her orders, not mine. If I liked to come with
her, why, of course I could. Otherwise, I could go halves with one of the
other correspondents in one of their cars. But she pointed out that I
could hardly do better than come with her, for by simply following Jimmy
I should get nearer to the firing-line than anybody else. (She had
assumed that the firing-line was the goal of every war-correspondent's
ambition.) I would find,