XI + 

He woke with the blaze of the eastern sun in his eyes, and on the first sensation of bewilderment at finding his bed was moss, came a rush of remembrance and with it self-reproach⁠—he had slept while Griselda suffered. He knelt and bent over her as she lay still asleep, huddled on her right side; her face was flushed, her lips were cracked, and she was breathing in heavy little snorts. As he knelt and gazed the thunder of yesterday broke out in the distance, and Griselda stirred and woke moaning. + 

Her first cry was for water, and in the insistence of her thirst she was oblivious of everything but her burning need to slake it; he broke cover and ran to the stream, some fifty yards away, soaked his handkerchief and made a tight cup of his hands. The cup was a failure, and the little that was left in it when he reached Griselda was spilled when she tried to drink; but the dripping handkerchief she sucked at eagerly and gave back for another soaking. He was about to break cover to wet it again when he caught sight first of one, then of half-a-dozen horsemen entering the valley by the gap; and shrank back, cowering, into the friendly shelter of the tree-trunks⁠—sick with uncertainty as to whether or no they had seen him. He judged not when he saw them dismount and picket their horses; and having watched them long enough to see that they were making preparations for a meal, he turned and crept back to Griselda. + 

The terror of yesterday came down on her when she heard his whispered news. A moment before she had seemed incapable of movement, lain crumpled on her side and repulsed, with a feverish pettishness, his efforts to stir and raise her; now she clung to him and struggled to her feet, even pain forgotten in the passion for instant flight. So, holding together, they fled again: fled crawling, they knew not whither. Two instincts guided them and directed their stumbling footsteps: the instinct to leave far behind them the threat of the guns and the instinct to keep out of sight. Thus they held to the woods above the valley of silence, avoiding all paths that led out into the open; their direction, roughly, was southward⁠—though they did not know it⁠—and they dragged a mile, or even less, where a man in health might make five. + 

When they had gone some few hundred yards they struck the trickle of a hillside rivulet on its way to join the stream in the valley. At the sound of its babble Griselda cried out and tried to hasten, and, when they came to it, slipped down till she could thrust her face into the water and drink like the sun-parched Israelites who marched with Gideon. They drank, they dabbled in it, bathed hands and feet, and Griselda washed her broken side⁠—touching it gingerly and not daring to pull away the linen that the blood had caked to the flesh. After that William helped her to her feet and they dragged on further. + 

If they found water in abundance, they found but little to eat; and though Griselda made no complaint of hunger, as the hours went by it gnawed at her husband’s vitals. At first their path lay chiefly through beechwoods bare of undergrowth, and they had been an hour or two on their way before they came to blackberry bushes. Upon these William fell, tearing his hands on the thorns by his eager stripping of the bushes; Griselda would hardly touch them, but he shovelled them into his mouth and ate long and voraciously. He had toiled much the day before and eaten little⁠—a scanty breakfast and the scraps of bread and meat allotted by his captors at midday⁠—and, shovel as he might, the berries were a poor substitute for the meal he craved and dreamed of. That was a meal which floated before the eye of his mind as phantom ham and eggs, phantom cuts from the joint, thick slabs of well-buttered bread; something solid that a man could set his teeth in and gnaw till his stomach was satisfied. He was ashamed of the way in which food and the longing for food possessed him⁠—so that there were moments when the phantom joint was more present to his mind than Griselda or the fear of death itself. + 

To the phase of violent and savage hunger succeeded, with hours, a giddy dreaminess, the result of growing exhaustion. As the day wore on and exhaustion increased, his mind, like his body, refused to work connectedly; his feet often stumbled and he was incapable of consecutive thought. Once he found himself sitting with Griselda under a beech-tree, holding her fingers and considering how they had come there and why they had got to go on; and wandering off into vague recollection of the story of a knightly lover who had carried his mistress long miles through a forest in his arms. The details of the story escaped his memory and he sought for them with pettish insistence; with perhaps at the back of his mind some idea, born of brain-fag, that, did he but remember them, he could do the same service for Griselda. + 

He had soon lost all sense of direction; but the instinct to hide never left him, and once or twice, when the wood seemed to be opening out, he drew his wife back to the solitude under the trees. With the passing of the hours their rests by the way grew longer; Griselda was able to keep her feet for a few minutes only before she muttered or signed a request for another halt. Whereat William would lower her to the ground where she propped herself against a tree-trunk or lay huddled and silent with closed eyes. + 

At one such halt he fell suddenly and helplessly asleep; perhaps Griselda did the same, for though the sun was high when he sat him down the woods were heavy with blue dusk when she roused him by a tugging at his sleeve. She was craving again for water; her lips were cracked for the want of it. They rose and went blindly in search⁠—halting every few minutes as much to strain their ears for the longed-for ripple as to give Griselda strength. More than once she was at failing point; so much so that he suggested she should lie down while he hunted further for a stream. She refused, trembling at the idea of being left alone⁠—unreasonably, but perhaps wisely, since William, astray in the darkening woods, might well have had difficulty in finding his way to her again. + 

The dusk was more than dusk before they found what they sought; it was actual darkness of night descending to cover the earth. They had halted perforce more than once when Griselda could go no further; but always her thirst burned her, and she rose and struggled forward again. She was past speaking when they came on a clearing, and then on a stream that ran through it, of which they were only aware when they trod into the marshy ground at its brim. She drank heavily, lay inert and seemed to sleep. + 

Perhaps because he had slept for so long in the afternoon her husband was more wakeful; for hours he sat with his eyes wide and his chin propped on his hands. After nightfall had come silence from the guns and at first the only sounds were forest sounds⁠—night-bird talk and the lapping of unseen water at his feet. Later Griselda was restless and became conversational, talking rapidly and brokenly in a delirium of pain and fever and paying no heed to his efforts to answer and calm her. Her mind, uncontrolled, had returned to a familiar channel; she was back in the world that had crumbled but yesterday, waging war as she understood it till she saw the hostages die. The Great Civil War that you fought with martyrdoms, with protests at meetings and hammers on plate-glass windows⁠—he could hear she was back in the thick of it incoherently addressing an audience. Snatches of old-time denunciation⁠—Asquith, McKenna, the sins of the Labour Party⁠—and, emerging from a torrent of incomprehensibility, the names of the Leaders of the Movement. He listened, crouched in the darkness, a starving fugitive⁠—who had seen men dismembered and done to death in a war that was not civil; and suddenly, crouched and starving in the darkness, he began to laugh out loud. He remembered⁠—quite plainly he remembered⁠—a letter written to the daily Press to point out with indignation that one of the Leaders of the Movement had been hurt in the ankle in the course of the Great Civil War.⁠ ⁠… He only laughed briefly; the echo of his own voice frightened him, and its cackle died swiftly away. In the grave black silence it sounded like a blasphemy, and he told himself excusingly that he had not been able to help it. + 

With rest and cessation of movement his brain worked more easily; and with the passing of his first savage hunger he was no longer preoccupied with the needs of his empty stomach. He considered the situation, dispassionately and curiously detached from it; deciding, with an odd lack of emotion, that tomorrow could not be as today. Whatever the need, Griselda could walk no further; he, for his part, was incapable of dragging her; when the light came they must just sit and wait. His mind refused to trouble itself with details of what would happen if they sat and waited too long. Looking back at that night it seemed to him that he was not able to feel very much; his capacity for emotion was exhausted, even as his body. When Griselda stirred or groaned he tried to shift her more comfortably, when she gasped for water he helped her to bend down and drink; but the power of imaginative terror had left him for the time being, and he no longer trembled and sickened at her suffering as he had done when she was first struck down. + 

He fell into a doze in the last hours of night, and when his eyes opened the sky was a pearly grey. He could see a wide stretch of it over the treetops; for at the spot to which they had wandered in the uncertainty of darkness the grouping of the trees was less close than it had been, and there was a suggestion of open space beyond them. Griselda lay sleeping or unconscious, with her knotted hair straying on her face; he smoothed it away as he knelt beside her, took her hand and called her by name. She gave no answer, and did not even stir when he kissed her. The power of imaginative terror had returned to him, and he asked himself whether she were dying?⁠ ⁠… He knelt beside her for a few minutes, fondling her hand and whispering, imploring her to speak⁠—and then, in a mingled curse and appeal, stretched his arms above his head towards heaven. The effort and emotion exhausted him; he collapsed both bodily and mentally, slipped back to the grass beside his wife and lay with his face to the ground. + 

What roused him was the sound of a man’s voice near him; not words, but a grunt of surprise unmistakably human. He lifted his head and saw gazing at him from the opposite bank of the brook the man who had uttered the grunt. A man carrying a pail, very filthy and many days unshorn; with a peaked cap flattened on the back of his head, a dark muddied coat and loose trousers that had once been red. His face, for all its grime and its black sprouts of beard, was reassuring in its interest; what he said was gibberish to William’s ears, but the sound of it kindly and inquiring, and, when William shook his head and pointed to his wife, he set down his unfilled pail on the grass and waded across the shallow stream. He looked at Griselda, touched her torpid hand gently and muttered more friendly gibberish; finishing by a pat on William’s shoulder before he waded back to the further bank, filled his pail to the brim and walked away with it. He turned to fling back a last gesture of promise before he vanished among the trees, leaving William to stare after him, motionless and dumb, and waiting for something, he knew not what, to happen. + 

What happened, after an interval, was the reappearance of the pail-bearer, this time minus his pail, but accompanied, in its stead, by a comrade. The comrade was scarcely less filthy and similarly clad; the twain emerged from between the trees, splashed across the brook and exchanged rapid gibberish while they stood and looked down at Griselda. Finally, one of them, addressing himself to William, pointed to somewhere on the opposite bank and nodded with intent to encourage; whereupon the pair of them lifted Griselda, made a seat of their arms and carried her. William followed them, lurching from weakness as he walked; and after they had gone about a couple of hundred yards the little procession came out on to a highway where a hooded car, as dirty as its guardians, was drawn up at the side of the road. + 

On the floor of the car the two men placed Griselda, laying her down gently and arranging, with kind, dirty hands, some empty sacks as a makeshift couch and a coat as a makeshift pillow. That done, they signed to William to climb in beside his wife, and one of them, noticing his feebleness, lent a hand to him over the tailboard, while the other provided him with a hunk of bread and a large tin mug of red wine. His hunger returned with the taste of food, and he ate with a ravenous enjoyment, gulping down bread and wine together; before he had finished gulping the car had started and was rattling over the road, he knew not whither. Woods went by them and open spaces; they spanned rivers, climbed hills and descended again into valleys. Sometimes the roads were rough, and at the jolting of the car Griselda would whimper and cry out⁠—whereat William would try to soothe her with assurance that the worst was over, they were safe and would soon be in comfort. He did not know if she understood; she never spoke coherently and hardly ever opened her eyes. + 

For the first wooded mile or two they had the road to themselves; after that they came across other traffic, the greater part of it heading in the same, mostly southerly, direction. It was varied traffic, mechanical, horse and foot: guns and other cars, some signed with the Geneva cross; now a cavalry patrol, now a dusty detachment of infantry; and, intermingled with soldier stragglers, little groups of nonmilitary wayfarers, in carts and tramping afoot. All these grew more frequent as the miles went under them; so frequent as to hinder their progress, and finally, when they neared their destination, bring the pace of the car to a crawl. + 

Their destination⁠—William never knew its name⁠—was a white-walled village, whereof the one long street was crowded with the traffic of humanity; the same kind of traffic they had passed on the road, but thickened and impeded by much that was stationary in horses, in men and in vehicles. The car jolted halfway along the stone-paved street and came to a standstill in the company of three or four others; its guardians descended and one of them⁠—the pail-bearer⁠—looked over the tail and nodded in friendly-wise to William before he hurried away. There was a few minutes’ wait, during which nothing personal happened⁠—only the confused sound of voices, the confused sound of movement flowing incessantly, movement of feet, wheels and engines; and then the man who had nodded from the tail of the car came back, others with him⁠—dirty soldiers like unto himself. One of these spoke to William, choosing his words with precision; and when he shook his head and answered, “I am English,” there was talk and much gesticulation. (It struck him later that they took him for a Flemish-speaking Belgian and perhaps had tried him with a word or two of the language.) To the accompaniment of talk and gesticulation the tailboard of the car was let down and William, by sign, was invited to set foot on the ground; whereafter Griselda was also lifted out and laid by the roadside on a truss of hay which someone had procured for the purpose. There she lay for another ten minutes or so, unaware of her surroundings while the stream of humanity flowed by her⁠—William, hunched beside her on the hay, wondering dumbly what would happen to them next. He knew himself among friends and was no longer afraid; but all initiative had left him, all power of action and idea. He had a dull hope that someone was bringing a doctor⁠ ⁠… meanwhile he could do nothing but wait and obey, and when his good Samaritan, the filthy little soldier, came back and tapped him on the shoulder, he rose, passively responsive. + 

The man signed to him that they should lift Griselda between them; he obeyed with infinite difficulty, panting at the effort, and together they carried her some yards down the street to a cart that stood pulled up and waiting⁠—a long, most un-English-looking country cart with a man perched in front and inside two women, many bundles, some ducks and a goat. One of the women was shrivelled and helpless with years; her head in a handkerchief and her gnarled fingers holding to her knees, she sat huddled against the protesting goat, a lump of bent, blear-eyed old age. Her companion in discomfort⁠—possibly her daughter⁠—was a stout, elderly peasant woman, the counterpart in petticoats of the grizzled-haired man who guided a solid grey farmhorse. She made room for Griselda, talking rapidly the while, in the straw at the bottom of the cart⁠—thrusting ducks and bundles to one side of the vehicle with her knotted and energetic hands; perhaps she was striving to explain to William that it was impossible to accommodate another passenger and that he must follow on foot. She may have been friend or acquaintance of the dirty Samaritan, for, as the cart moved off at a foot’s pace, she waved to him in friendly guise; the dirty Samaritan, for his part, clapping William on the back, pointing after the cart and showing his teeth in a final grin of encouragement. In the days that followed William often regretted that he had not known how to thank him for the bounty of his overflowing charity. + 

He walked after the cart as it lumbered through the village and out of it. Nourishment and the sense of relief had given back some of his strength; thus he was able, if with difficulty, to keep up with the plodding of the solid grey farmhorse⁠—often brought to a standstill, moreover, by the traffic that cumbered the road. Sometimes the standstill was a long one, accompanied by confusion and shouting; there was a point where a stream of fugitives flowing southward met reinforcements hurrying north⁠—and a flock of panic-stricken sheep, caught between the two, charged backwards and forwards, to the yells of their sweating drivers and the anger of a captain of cavalry. At almost every crossroads the stream was swollen by a fresh rivulet of fugitives⁠—refugees human and animal; thus at such junctions the pace was slower and a halt frequently called for. When it came William dropped down with thankfulness; sometimes lying torpid till the cart moved on, sometimes satisfying hunger and quenching thirst with fruit from the regiments of orchard trees that lined the sides of the road. + 

The stout peasant woman was more kindly than a hard face promised. She was careful and troubled about many things⁠—the old wreck of humanity, her livestock, the safety of herself and her bundles⁠—and she had lost her home and her livelihood; but she found time to think of Griselda and do what she could for her. She arranged her straw pillow, wiped the dust from her face, and from time to time raised her that she might hold a cup to her lips. Somewhere about midday she attended to the general needs; the cart was halted and she doled out a ration all round⁠—hunks of bread chopped from a yard of loaf and portions of a half-liquid cheese. William was not forgotten, and shared with the rest of the party; they ate with the cart drawn up in a field a little way from the road; the horse grazing, the goat tethered to one of the wheels, the peasants and William sitting on the ground and Griselda lying in her straw. William climbed up beside her and coaxed a little wine between her lips; she had swallowed hardly a mouthful when she turned her head aside and pushed the mug feebly away. He was not sure if she responded when he spoke to her and stroked her hand; she muttered once or twice but it was only a sound to his ears. For a moment⁠—perhaps it was the raw, red wine that had mounted to his head⁠—there came over him a sort of irritation at her long and persistent silence. She must know what it meant to see her suffer and have no word; he felt she might have tried to rouse herself to the extent of one little smile of comfort. + 

The afternoon was as the morning⁠—a weary journeying whereof he knew not the goal. The grey horse plodded, the women sat hunched amid their bundles, and William tramped on his blistered feet at the tail of the creaking cart; when he looked ahead the road, as far as his eye could reach, was dotted with fugitive tramps and fugitive vehicles⁠—and when he looked back there were others following in their tracks. For the most part, however, he looked neither back nor forward but trudged with his eyes on the ground through the whitened grass at the roadside. No rain had fallen for many days and the road was deep in dust; it hung heavy in the air and when a car went by it rose in clouds like smoke. The trees were thick with it, and every man’s garments were powdered by its uniform grey. + 

More than once their way led them through a village⁠—which might have been always the same village, so alike was its aspect and its doings. Always some of the houses would be closed and some in the act of emptying; in each and all was the same scene of miserable haste, of loading carts, of families, scared and burdened, setting out on their flight to the southward. It was a scene that grew so familiar to William that, staggering with the weight of his own weariness, he hardly turned his head to watch it; it affected him only by the halts it caused, by the need of manoeuvring through a crowd. Cut off from his fellows by the lack of intelligible speech, he trudged on like an animal at the tail of the cart, ignorant as an animal of what the next hours might bring him. + 

There were moments when it seemed to him that he was asleep and would surely waken; when he put out his hand to touch something and feel that it resisted and was real⁠—a dusty axle, a gate, a wall, the dusty bark of a fruit-tree. And there were other moments when the now was real, and he seemed to have newly wakened from the dream of a world impossible⁠—of streets and stations and meals that came regularly, of life that was decent and reasonable and orderly, with men like unto himself.⁠ ⁠… Late in the afternoon he started and lifted his head in sudden trembling recognition of a sound reminiscent, and because reminiscent beloved⁠—the nearby whistle of a passing engine, the nearby clank of a train. The note of the whistle, the sight of a long line of trucks⁠—but a field’s-breadth away behind a fence⁠—brought a rush of hope to his heart and a rush of tears to his eyes. His soul thrilled with the promise of them; after the vagabond horror of the last few days they stood for decency, for civilization, for a means of escape from hell. His eyes followed the train with longing as it snorted over a level meadow and wound out of sight behind a hill⁠—followed it with longing, with something that was almost love. + 

A mile or two further they passed a level crossing and soon after came again on a village. It was larger than any they had so far traversed, and in ordinary times must have been of a prosperous importance; now many of its windows were bolted and shuttered, denoting the flight of inhabitants whom others were preparing to follow. The sun was red in the west when they reached its outskirts. + 

It was when they were about halfway along the wide paved street that there came a loud cry from the cart⁠—so loud and so sudden that the driver pulled at his horse. + 

The cry had come from the hard-faced peasant woman who was leaning over Griselda. The life in William stood still as he saw her face, and she had to beckon to him twice before he moved to climb into the cart; she gave him a hand as he climbed and half jerked him over the bundles.⁠ ⁠… Griselda had died very quietly in the straw at the bottom of the cart. + 