They were standing there, she and John Conway and Sutton, looking over the station and the railway lines to the open country beyond: the fields, the tall slender trees, the low mounds of the little hills, bristling and dark. Round the corner of the balcony they could see into the _Place_ below; it was filled with a thick black crowd of refugees. Antwerp was falling. Presently the ambulance train would come in and they would have to go over there to the station with their stretchers and carry out the wounded. Meanwhile they waited. John brooded. His face was heavy and sombre with discontent. "No," he said. "No. It isn't good enough." "What isn't?" "What we're doing here. Going to all those little tin-pot places. The real fighting isn't down there. They ought to send us to Antwerp." "I suppose they send us where they think we're most wanted." "I don't believe they do. We were fools not to have insisted on going to Antwerp, instead of letting ourselves be stuck here in a rotten side show." "We've had enough to do, anyhow," said Sutton. "And there isn't anybody but us and Mac to do it," Charlotte said. John's eyebrows twisted. "Yes; but we're not _in_ it. I want to be in it. In the big thing; the big dangerous thing." Sutton sighed and got up and left them. John waited for the closing of the door. "Does it strike you," he said, "that Billy isn't very keen?" "No. It doesn't. What do you mean?" "I notice that he's jolly glad when he can get an indoor job." "That's because they're short of surgeons. He only wants to do what's most useful." "I didn't say he had cold feet." "Of course he hasn't. Billy would go to Antwerp like a shot if they'd let him. He feels just as we do about it. That's why he got up and went away." "He'd go. But he wouldn't enjoy it." "Oh, don't talk about 'enjoying.'" "Sharlie, you don't mean to say that _you're_ not keen?" "No. It's only that I don't care as much as I did about what you call the romance of it; and I do care more about the solid work. It seems to me that it doesn't matter who does it so long as it's done." "I'd very much rather I did it than McClane. So would you." "Yes. I would. But I'd be sorry if poor little Mac didn't get any of it. And all the time I know it doesn't matter which of us it is. It doesn't matter whether we're in danger or out of danger, or whether we're in the big thing or a little one." "Don't you want to be in the big thing?" "Yes. I _want_. But I know my wanting doesn't matter. I don't matter. None of us matters."