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That afternoon the battle began to sweep round from Quatrecht to Melle; and on our third journey out a rumour reached us at the barrier where the sentry stood guard. It was one of those preposterous rumours that run before disaster and are started God knows how when a retreat begins.
I think it was the Belgian Red Cross men who spread it, for I heard the guide who went with Jimmy's Field Ambulance assuring him seriously that seven thousand British had been surrounded and cut to pieces on the road between Quatrecht and Melle. To be sure the number diminished with each repetition of the tale, dropping from seven thousand to seven hundred and from seven hundred to seventy.
Yesterday they, she and John, had been vivid entities, intensely real, living and moving in the war as in a containing space that was real enough, since it was there, but real like hell or heaven or God, not to be grasped or felt in its reality; only the stretch of it that they covered was real, the roads round Ghent, the burning villages, the places where they served, Berlaere and Melle, Quatrecht and Zele; the wounded men.
By the fifth day they knew that it had distinguished itself at Alost and Termonde and Quatrecht. The names sounded in their brains like a song with an exciting, maddening refrain. October stretched before them, golden and blank, a volume of tense, vibrating time. Nothing for it but to wait and wait. The summons might come any minute.
By the end of our first week Jimmy seemed to get used to being followed as a matter of course. We had followed him to Alost and Termonde and Quatrecht and Zele. When we weren't following him we were near him somewhere, working at the dressing-stations or among the refugees. Then he did a mean thing. He managed to get himself sent to Antwerp for three days.
The young blond barmaid of the Quatrecht Inn told us on October 4 that a German captain came and cried like a baby in the taproom on the evening of September 7, after he had laid waste Quatrecht and Melle. To her fanciful, untrained mind he was thinking of his own wife and children. So, at least, she thought as she watched him, after serving him in his thirst.
They sat brooding over the map of Belgium, marking down the names of the places, Alost, Termonde and Quatrecht, that McClane had gone to, that he would talk about on his return, when an awful interest would impel them to listen. He and Mrs.
At least, we knew that Reggie's regiment, the Third shires, had come up from Ostend the day before, that it was quartered somewhere between Ghent and Melle, and that it had been engaged at Quatrecht. Our own orders were to stick to Melle. I suppose from the way the ambulances were massed there that the end had been foreseen.
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