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."

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