That was how she felt about it now that it had come to defeat, now that Antwerp was falling. 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. Yesterday her thoughts about John had mattered, her doubt and fear of him and her pain; her agony of desire that he should be, should be always, what she loved him for being; and her final certainty had been the one important, the one real thing. To-day she had difficulty in remembering all that, as if _they_ hadn't really been. To-day they were unimportant to themselves and to each other; small, not quite real existences, enveloped by an immense reality that closed in on them; alive; black, palpitating defeat. It made nothing of them, of their bodies nothing but the parts they worked with: feet and hands. Nothing mattered, nothing existed but the war, and the armies, the Belgian army, beaten. Antwerp was falling. And afterwards it would be Ghent, and then Ostend. And then there would be no more Belgium. But John wouldn't hear of it. Ghent wouldn't fall. "It won't fall because it isn't a fortified city," she objected. "But it'll surrender. It'll have to." "It won't. If the Germans come anywhere near we shall drive them back." "They _are_ near. They're all round in a ring with only a little narrow opening up _there_. And the ring's getting closer." "It's easier to push back a narrow ring than a wide one." "It's easier to break through a thin ring than a thick one, and who's going to push?" "We are. The British. We'll come pouring in, hundreds of thousands of us, through that little narrow opening up there." "If we only would--" "Of course we shall. If I thought we wouldn't, if I thought we were going to let the Belgians down, if we _betrayed_ them--My God! I'd kill myself.... No. No, I wouldn't. That wouldn't hurt enough. I'd give up my damned country and be a naturalized Belgian. Why, they trust us. They _trust_ us to save Antwerp." "If we don't, that wouldn't be betrayal." "It would. The worst kind. It would be like betraying a wounded man; or a woman. Like me betraying you, Jeanne. You needn't look like that. It's so bad that it can't happen." Through the enveloping sadness she felt a prick of joy, seeing him so valiant, so unbeaten in his soul. It supported her certainty. His soul was so big that nothing could satisfy it but the big thing, the big dangerous thing. He wouldn't even believe that Antwerp was falling. * * * * * She knew. She knew. There was not the smallest doubt about it any more. She saw it happen.