He told one grim story of an invalid woman unable to move, lying in bed in her appartement, and of how her husband went out on the balcony to look at the Zeppelin.  There was a great noise of shooting.  Ever and again he would put his head back into the room and tell her things, and then after a time he was silent and looked in no more.  She called to him, and called again.  Becoming frightened, she raised herself by a great effort and peered through the glass.  At first she was too puzzled to understand what had happened.  He was hanging over the front of the balcony, with his head twisted oddly.  Twisted and shattered.  He had been killed by shrapnel fired from the outer fortifications....

These are the things that happen in histories and stories.  They do not happen at Matching’s Easy....

Mr. Van der Pant did not seem to be angry with the Germans.  But he manifestly regarded them as people to be killed.  He denounced nothing that they had done; he related.  They were just an evil accident that had happened to Belgium and mankind.  They had to be destroyed.  He gave Mr. Britling an extraordinary persuasion that knives were being sharpened in every cellar in Brussels and Antwerp against the day of inevitable retreat, of a resolution to exterminate the invader that was far too deep to be vindictive....  And the man was most amazingly unconquered.  Mr. Britling perceived the label on his habitual dinner wine with a slight embarrassment.  “Do you care,” he asked, “to drink a German wine?  This is Berncasteler from the Moselle.”  Mr. Van der Pant reflected.  “But it is a good wine,” he said.  “After the peace it will be Belgian....  Yes, if we are to be safe in the future from such a war as this, we must have our boundaries right up to the Rhine.”

So he sat and talked, flushed and, as it were, elated by the vividness of all that he had undergone.  He had no trace of tragic quality, no hint of subjugation.  But for his costume and his trimmed beard and his language he might have been a Dubliner or a Cockney.

He was astonishingly cut off from all his belongings.  His house in Antwerp was abandoned to the invader; valuables and cherished objects very skilfully buried in the garden; he had no change of clothing except what the rucksack held.  His only footwear were the boots he came in.  He could not get on any of the slippers in the house, they were all too small for him, until suddenly Mrs. Britling bethought herself of Herr Heinrich’s pair, still left unpacked upstairs.  She produced them, and they fitted exactly.  It seemed only poetical justice, a foretaste of national compensations, to annex them to Belgium forthwith....