"I can. And I shall, if Mac doesn't come."
"You'll be taken," he shouted.
"I don't care. If I'm taken, I'm taken. I shall carry him on my back."
While John still went backwards she thought: It's all right. If he sees I'm not coming he won't go. He'll come back to the stretcher.
But John had turned and was running.
Even then she didn't realise that he was running away, that she was left there with the wounded man. Things didn't happen like that. People ran away all of a sudden, in panics, because they couldn't help it; they didn't begin by going slowly and stopping to argue and turning round and walking backwards; they were gone before they knew where they were. She believed that he was going for the ambulance. One moment she believed it and the next she knew better. As she waited in the road (conscious of the turn, the turn with its curving screen of tall trees) her knowledge, her dreadful knowledge, came to her, dark and evil, creeping up and up. John wasn't coming back. He would no more come back than he had come back the other day. Sutton had come. The other day had been like to-day. John was like that.
Her mind stood still in amazement, seeing, seeing clearly, what John was like. For a moment she forgot about the Germans.
She thought: I don't believe Mac's gone. He wouldn't go until he'd got them all in. Mac would come.
Then she thought about the Germans again. All this was making it much more dangerous for Mac and everybody, with the Germans coming round the corner any minute; she had no business to stand there thinking; she must pick that man up on her back and go on.
She stooped down and turned him over on his chest. Then, with great difficulty, she got him up on to his feet; she took him by the wrists and, stooping again, swung him on to her shoulder. These acts, requiring attention and drawing on all her energy, dulled the pain of her knowledge. When she stood up with him she saw John and McClane coming to her. She lowered her man gently back on to the stretcher.
The Flamand, thinking that she had given it up and that he was now abandoned to the Germans, groaned.
"It's all right," she said. "He's coming."
She saw McClane holding John by the arm, and in her pain there was a sharper pang. She had the illusion of his being dragged back unwillingly.
McClane smiled as he came to her. He glanced at the Flamand lying heaped on his stretcher.