stretcher and McClane waited for them at the top. The doors of the houses
were open; Flemish women stood outside, looking up to the street. There
was one house with a shut door, a tall green door; she thought that would
be the one that John had gone into. She rapped and he opened the door and
came striding out, holding his head high. He shut the door quietly and
looked at her, an odd look, piercing and grave.

"Dead," he said.

And when McClane met them he said it again, "Dead."

The wounded were being brought down from Lokeren in trams that ran on to
a siding behind a little fir plantation outside the village. At the wide
top of the street a table of boards and trestles stood by the foot track,
and the stretchers were laid on it as they came in, and the wounded had
their first bandaging and dressings there. McClane took up his place by
this table, and the stretcher bearers went backwards and forwards between
the village and the plantation.

Beyond the plantation the flagged road stretched flat and grey, then bent
in a deep curve, and on the wider sweep of the curve a row of tall,
slender trees stood up like a screen.

It would be round the turn of the road under the trees that the Germans
would come when they came. You couldn't lose this sense of them, coming
on behind there, not yet seen, but behind, coming on, pursuing the
retreat of the batteries. Every now and then they found themselves
looking up towards the turn. The grey, bending sweep and the screen of
tall trees had a fascination for them, a glamour; and above the movements
of their hands and feet their minds watched, intent, excited, but without