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Updated: June 11, 2025
The sober, slow-moving, slow-thinking Flemish townspeople were suddenly transformed into a herd of terror-stricken cattle. So complete was the German enveloping movement that only three avenues of escape remained open: westward, through St. Nicolas and Lokeren, to Ghent; north- eastward across the frontier into Holland; down the Scheldt toward Flushing.
The women were doing everything working in the fields, tending the cattle, driving the market-carts and the milk-carts with their polished brass cans. After leaving Ghent, the men came into view, for at Lokeren and St. Nicholas were important military stations, whilst nearer to Antwerp very extensive entrenchments and wire entanglements were being constructed.
To our dismay, we found that Lokeren, half-way to Ghent, was in the hands of the Germans, and that we must make a detour, taking us close to the Dutch border, and nearly doubling the distance. Without a guide, and in the dark, we could never have reached our destination; but we were fortunate enough to get a guide, and we set out on our long drive through the night.
If I took Viola's car and Colville, she couldn't follow us. "She won't follow us," he said. "She can't leave him." We made the first bolt into Lokeren together; and we got out, each with a load of wounded, just as the Germans were coming in. He made his second bolt by himself and secretly, while Colville and I were lunching. We followed, and were stopped in a village two miles from Lokeren.
Would they take a stretcher and find him? He had to go back to the tramway. The last tram was coming in from Lokeren. He ran back, fussy and a little frightened. John shouted out, "Hold on, McClane, there's another tram coming," and set off up the street. They had taken all the men out of the houses; therefore the man with the bad wound must have been left somewhere by the plantation.
It was one thing to go into Antwerp when the Germans were so busy storming it that they couldn't attend to you, and quite another thing to be alone with Jimmy on that horrid grey road with the Germans coming every minute round the turn of it. Jimmy explained that there was a wounded man hiding in a ditch about a mile from Lokeren, and he'd got to fetch him.
He must have mattered to Jevons when he brought him from Antwerp and when we buried him in Ghent. And the cross on his grave reproves me, reminding me that to his country he mattered supremely, after all. After Lokeren Jevons and I tried to come to terms with Viola. The conference took place upstairs in their bedroom, where we had withdrawn for greater privacy.
I do not remember its name, if I ever knew it; but I know and remember every house in it and every tree in the avenue at the turn of the grey road that led to Lokeren, and even now, in my worst dreams, I find myself in the little plantation at the end of the village on the left where the railway siding is, and where the trains came in loaded with wounded.
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