WAAC - Part 1

WAAC


THE WOMAN'S STORY OF THE WAR




ANONYMOUS




FIFTH IMPRESSION



LONDON
T. WERNER LAURIE LTD.
COBHAM HOUSE. 24 & 26 WATER LANE, E.C.4




WAAC

THE WOMAN'S STORY OF THE WAR

This story of the War, written by a woman, is very timely, coming as it does after so many War novels, which only gave the man's point of view. In this volume we have the intimate story of a young girl during the same period, and in it she realistically describes her adventures and love affairs.




All rights reserved

First Published in March 1930
Second Impression April 1930
Third Impression April 1930
Fourth Impression April 1930
Fifth Impression June 1931


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
BISHOP & SONS LTD., NICOLSON SQUARE, EDINBURGH




INTRODUCTORY NOTE

It was on the night of a dinner of the Old Comrades' Association in London last December (1929) that a very dear friend who had attended it and whom I had not seen for seven years—in this narrative I call her "Gwen"—said to me:

"Why don't you write your War reminiscences? They were so much more interesting and exciting than the experiences of most of us."

I told her that I had never written anything in my life.

"But I am sure you could," she replied. "You write such good letters."

I thought it over, and finally decided to see what I could do.

In the following pages I have avoided trying to harrow readers' feelings with gruesome descriptions of battlefield and war-hospital horrors, for that has been done already—in my opinion overdone. I have set down incidents amusing, pathetic, sometimes exciting and occasionally terrible, as I remember them and just as they come back to me. Names I have in most cases omitted—for an obvious reason. Unfortunately I kept no diary, so I cannot guarantee accuracy in dates and exact localities.

THE AUTHOR.




CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII CHAPTER XXIII



WAAC

THE WOMAN'S STORY OF THE WAR


CHAPTER I

"Connie, we are going into the war!"

I can see my old father still, standing there at the open door of the library with a peculiar expression in his eyes, an expression I had seen in his eyes only once or twice before. Once, when he had just heard that his sister had been killed in a railway accident near Shrewsbury. Once, when he had broken to us the news that he had lost heavily on the Stock Exchange.

He and I had always been such comrades, such confidants. Far closer confidants than he and my mother were. Perhaps because I was his only daughter and the youngest of the family.

My father was a parson living in a Rectory in the Midlands, six miles from the nearest town, and two from the little wayside railway station. My eldest brother was in the Navy. My second brother a lawyer in the Far East. Another, an actor of sorts in provincial touring companies. My youngest brother, an infantry subaltern—gazetted barely a year.

I was nineteen and had no occupation. I did nothing because my mother was old-fashioned (even for 1914), and considered it bad form, "unladylike," for a girl situated as I was to do anything. At least anything useful. My job was to marry. I suppose that had been my mother's "job" at my age.

My father came into the room, shut the door and sat down. Soon he got up and began to walk to and fro without speaking. I knew that when he did that it meant that he had something on his mind and was turning it over and didn't want to be spoken to. So I said nothing.

"I can't realize it, Connie," he said at last. "It is too frightful."

"The grocer said to me yesterday," I replied, "that in any case the war would be over in six months, so that even if we were dragged into it it wouldn't matter much."

"Damn the grocer!" he exclaimed hotly. "That was what they said when the Boer War broke out—'a punitive expedition that would be over by Christmas.' You shouldn't listen to what people of that sort say. They just foretell what they hope will happen."

My mother came in. She was one of those placid women whom nothing ever agitates, because they lack imagination. When my father told her the news her only comment was:

"Well, I suppose what must be must be. God knows best. I hope they won't send Henry out (Henry was my soldier brother), and that the Navy will keep out of it. The fighting will all be on the other side of the Channel, won't it?"

My mother was a good woman in the ordinary acceptation of that misbegotten phrase, and I am sure she did her best for us all according to her lights. But somehow she and I never hit it off. We were so different temperamentally. Neither of us was to blame.

During the next fortnight or more I bicycled into the town every afternoon to try to find out what was happening, for the newspapers had all at once grown reticent. There were Union Jacks everywhere, and one met little parties of young men marching along the streets, often in their shirt-sleeves—the weather was intolerably hot—with sloped broom-sticks on their shoulders to represent rifles. They marched in step and looked flushed and excited.

But everybody was more or less excited, and many looked harassed. Everybody asked everybody else what was going to happen, and of course nobody could say. But on one point practically all the aborigines were unanimous. The war could not last long.

"Well, Miss Connie, and what are you going to do?"

I was reading a telegram stuck up in the post-office window when I heard a familiar voice at my elbow. The speaker was an old friend of my father's, one of the County people, with a nice place three miles from the town. He had taught me to ride when I was a tot, but since I had grown up had always called me "Miss Connie" in the old-fashioned way.

I turned to him, smiling. He was rather an old dear.

"Do?" I said. "I don't understand. There is nothing I can do—except, I suppose, knit socks and mufflers and help in jumble sales. That is what I am told all of us will be expected to do presently. Sit at home and knit while our men are fighting for us. It sounds heroic?"

But the old man was serious.

"You will have to do a great deal more than that before this war is over," was his answer, as he looked at me hard. "This is going to be a European war and it will last for years. Lord Roberts, poor old Bobs, one of my dearest friends, warned us long ago that it would come, and nobody believed him—people made fun of his prophecy. He and I were talking about it only the other day. But you—I thought you went through a course of first aid and nursing after you left school?"

"Yes, I did, but...."

"But what?"

I felt embarrassed. It had not occurred to me to think that the course I had gone through might now prove of use. I knew that some girls of my age, and younger, as well as much older women, were volunteering to help in various ways....

And then my mother. What would she say if I hinted that I would like to do something to help? The idea would shock her. As yet none of "the County" had enlisted as nurses or volunteered to do anything really useful. It had not become fashionable. It was a thing which as yet "wasn't done" by people like us. Later, of course, the illustrated weeklies became crowded with full-page portraits of Society women and County folk looking ravishing in their becoming nurse's uniforms.

"Lady A has joined the ranks of our Noble War Nurses."

"The Countess of B, who is nursing in Blank Hospital."

"Viscountess C, an indefatigable Red-Cross Worker."

And so on. But that time was not yet.

"Well?"

I looked up. The old man's kindly eyes were gazing into mine.

"You ought to do your bit, Miss Connie. You'll be made to later. Why not start at once? Why wait until all the stupid women who inhabit this county of ours agree that it is 'the right thing to do' just because they read in the newspapers that London Society has begun to bestir itself? If you would like to help in a hospital, for instance, I could help you with an introduction; I don't say they would make you a nurse at once, you might first of all be put to scrub floors and things. You needn't decide here and now. Just think it over when you get home, and if the idea appeals to you—ring me up. I know that your father would approve. What age are you?"

I told him.

He smiled. "Still, I dare say it can be managed."

My mother was distinctly antagonistic when the suggestion was made to her that I wanted to help in a hospital. It was my father who broached the subject on my behalf, and who argued with my mother that it was a thing I ought to do. In a month or two everybody—by which he meant all the County people—would be helping in one way or another, and so...

Later he took me aside.

"I have talked your mother round," he said. "And now I want to talk to you. As you know, Connie, I have not been a parson all my life—I sometimes feel I ought not to be one at all, as I was pretty much of a rolling stone years before you were born, and my outlook on life is rather a peculiar outlook for a parson to have. Connie, of course you know that you are an exceptionally pretty and attractive girl—I talk to you quite frankly—and therefore you will need to be careful. Though I was never a soldier, after trading mules to our Government, in New Orleans, during the first year of the Boer War, I went on to Capetown, as I know I have told you before. From there I moved about a good deal in South Africa and saw much of what was going on—more than I ought to have seen. I saw more than a little of the women who went out there to become hospital nurses and what not, and some of them were pretty disgusting.

"And so it will be in this war, only probably more so, and I therefore want to put you on your guard. You will have to take the rough with the smooth, by that I mean mix with the good and the bad, and with your personal attractiveness you will for certain have plenty of the wrong sort hanging around you. Connie, for God's sake be careful. I know your temperament probably better than you yourself do. The men, too, that you will meet. War changes some men's natures completely, makes some of us beasts, at any rate for a time. You have seen little of the world, and nothing of a war world. You most likely think that all gentlemen, as we call them, the type of man you meet here in the hunting-field, are underneath what they appear on the surface to be. They most likely are—in peace-time. Yet in a war atmosphere they change—nearly all of them change. Even Henry I wouldn't trust. By the way, I have a telegram from him. He is coming here to-morrow for one night. Next week—well, next week he goes out to France."

I saw my father wince, and something seemed to clutch me inside. Yet of course we had both known that Henry would have to go. I suppose, however, we realized in that instant that this brief visit might mark his parting from us—for ever. I quickly changed the subject.

Henry arrived in the highest spirits. Like all the young subalterns at that time, he looked on the war merely as a great adventure. He could talk of nothing else. All he hoped was that he would get to France in time to see "something of the fun."

I wonder if young men have any sort of imagination? Though younger than Henry, I found it impossible to think of the war as anything but a horrible and stupid slaughter of human beings who could have no reason for hating or wanting to kill each other individually. Naturally I realized that England would, under existing circumstances, have been for ever disgraced had she decided to sit on the fence. But that realization did not make war seem more justifiable.

"What about Lionel?" Henry said suddenly. Lionel was our actor brother. "He'll join up, I suppose?"

I said nothing for some moments. Lionel had written to me the week before saying that he could not possibly cancel his contract—his tour was due to continue for another seven weeks.

"You see, I am playing second lead," the letter went on, "and if Jones joins up, as he talks of doing, I shall step into his shoes, as I am understudying him. I can't afford to let slip such an opportunity for advancement and increased salary. The war can't last, everybody says so, so by the time I had finished my training—-if I enlisted—everything would most likely be over and peace have been declared..." and so it continued.

"Lionel has not yet decided what he will do," I lied. "He is on a good job, and good jobs are hard to get."

"To hell with good jobs!" Henry exclaimed. "Read that."

He fished a crumpled telegram out of his pocket and pushed it across to me. It was from our lawyer brother in the Far East:


"Returning England immediately joining up. "TOM."

Henry spent most of the day with me—he was my favourite brother—and on the following morning I saw him off at the wayside railway station: he had parted from our parents at home.

Even after all these years I can remember that parting on the deserted little platform, and his last kiss. I believed I knew then that I should never see him again.

My father's old friend was as good as his word, and in less than a few weeks he rang me up to say that everything was arranged. I was to report as soon as possible at an address in London, which he gave me, and ask to see Lady G.

She was a tall, austere-looking woman of few words. She bowed slightly, pointed to a chair, and proceeded to ask me a number of pertinent questions.

"Say Yes, or No, nothing more," she said without looking up from the paper on which she was writing my replies. When she had finished she folded the paper, handed it to me, and said:

"Take that to——" she told me an address. "The matron there will see you. Good afternoon."

Not a smile. Not a kind word. I might have been applying for some lucrative post, instead of offering my services gratuitously and signing away my liberty for an indefinite period.

Not until long afterwards did I discover what a kind and gentle woman Lady G was, and that on the very day she interviewed me she had been notified of the death in action of her eldest son. Before the war was over she lost two more sons, the only two she had left.

I was sent to a hospital outside London and detailed to wash dishes. When I had been there less than a week I was ordered to wash a corpse—the first corpse I had ever seen. After that I was put in charge of some ducks and geese and young turkeys. In a few weeks' time I got orders to go to France.

In the boat several men scraped acquaintance with me. They were not in uniform, and I couldn't quite place them. They were extremely polite, however, and helped me with my hand baggage while we were landing. I was not wearing any uniform, so was astonished when one of them offered to give me a lift in his taxi to the address that I had told him I wanted to go to.

When we had gone a little way he called to the driver to stop.

"This is F——'s Bar," he said. "I have to see somebody here, but I won't keep you waiting more than a minute or two."

I had waited barely a minute when the man returned with two other men in mufti, one of them a Frenchman.

They raised their hats, and I felt the Frenchman's eyes literally glued on my face.

"You speak French?" he inquired in French. I told him in French that I did.

"Will you get out and come this way, please?"

I began to feel uneasy.

"But why?" I asked.

"It is necessary," he replied in a sudden tone of authority.

Rather nervously I got out of the taxi. The Frenchman and his companion were talking in undertones. The man who had brought me had gone back into the bar.

They got one on each side of me.

"We have to cross the road," the Frenchman said.

"But my baggage," I exclaimed. "I can't leave it in the taxi unattended. It may be stolen. The driver may go off with it."

"The driver will not go off with it, Mademoiselle," was the prompt reply.

We walked about a hundred yards along the street, turned to the right, and went into an hotel. The Frenchman whispered something to the manager, who replied "Parfaitement." Then the three of us entered the lift.

Some moments later we were alone in a small sitting-room.

"Will Mademoiselle please take off her hat?"

I took it off. By this time I was growing alarmed. Were they going to abduct me? I knew now that the polite stranger in the boat had not been polite for nothing. When offering me that lift in his taxi he had some definite reason for doing so.

The Frenchman's companion, a Jewish looking person, opened a large dispatch case which he carried, and produced from it an album. This he laid on the table and opened. It contained pages of photographic portraits, with writing under each.

When he had turned over several pages he stopped and put his finger on one of the photographs, and said; "This one."

I could see that it was the photograph of a woman.

The Frenchman pulled a small magnifier out of his pocket, scrutinized the portrait with it for some moments, then took a step towards me and began to examine my face with the magnifier.

Then he examined my ears and my throat and the back of my neck in the same way.

"Tiens!" he exclaimed, smiling for the first time. "C'est drôle!"

Yet apparently he was not completely satisfied, for he went on to ask me a number of questions—one or two were rather embarrassing questions. And then it suddenly dawned on me what was happening, or had happened.

I felt intensely relieved.

"May I see the portrait of my double?" I asked.

"Mais non, Mademoiselle. C'est defendu."

And he shut the album.

After that both men were most polite. I had told them at the outset who I was and what I had come over for, and had offered to show them my papers. They had replied that they did not wish to see my papers. Now they begged me to join them in an apéritif, and thinking that if I did so it might help to cement the entente cordiale, I consented.

The Frenchman, whose manner had all at once completely changed (from being a solemn official he had become a bon camarade) naturally grew flirtatious. I did not then know—though I quickly discovered—that a Frenchman can no more help trying to flirt with any woman who has a vestige of good looks than he can help eating his dinner when he is hungry.




CHAPTER II

That hospital at a French Base! It was a temporary affair consisting of one or two tents perched on a plateau on a hill some way out of the town. To reach it without a long détour one had to climb a very steep hill.

There were only seven nurses and the head nurse, who called herself "matron," though anybody less like a hospital matron I have never seen. She had hair of shining gold, very beautiful blue eyes, a most intriguing little retroussé nose, and a figure that I know the other girls—I beg their pardon, "sisters"—envied. Her age at most was twenty-four.

She received me with a smile and kissed me—so unlike Lady G's greeting!—and told me to sit down and have a cup of tea.

"Now tell me all about yourself," she said when we had talked commonplaces for some minutes. "Are you out here for fun, or are you one of the serious sort?"

I couldn't help smiling. I sized her up at once; yet there was something rather irresistible about her.

"I believe I am one of the serious sort," I answered. "Anyway, I haven't come to France for fun."

"They all say that," she laughed. "Tea sweet enough?"

I wanted to feel annoyed, but couldn't.

"Have you many patients?" I asked.

"I really can't tell you," she replied. "They come and go so. But there is one dear boy I am sure you will like. Such a baby. Got shot across the back while he was crawling on all fours to cut some wire. A fraction of an inch more and the bullet would have touched his spine. But you must not monopolize him, or you'll annoy the other sisters. They are all in love with him. He'll be going back to Blighty soon, I am afraid. Have another cup?"

Casually I mentioned that I had lately been through a first aid course and a course of nursing.

"Not really!" she exclaimed. "Why, that's splendid. I shall make you my 'second in command'!"

She touched a spring bell, and another girl came in. She was tall and dark and rather plain. But she had laughing eyes.

"Jones" (her name was not Jones), the matron said, "this is... I've forgotten your name."

I told her.

"Of course. Take her along, dear, and show her all that she ought to see."

Then she drew her aside and they spoke in undertones for a minute or two.

"Isn't she a scream?" the new sister said when we had gone out of the tent. "But we all love her. And she knows her job. Make no mistake about that. Did she tell you about the boy she is in love with, the one who got shot across the back?"

I said that she had.

"She would! Well, she's not the only one. You got a boy out here?"

"Boy?" I said, not understanding.

She laughed aloud.

"Fellow. Chap. Young man if you like."

"Oh, no," I said quickly. "I have only just come out."

"Of course. I didn't know. You've not had time. You'll find us a happy little family, not like some hospitals. Nobody nasty or catty or anything of that sort."

"Have you many wounded?"

"Let me see—about twenty to-day. Pretty bad, some of them. Two died yesterday and one this morning. You'll see them all presently. Tell me, dear, have you ever had a man? You look as if you hadn't, but you are so pretty I am sure you must have."

I admit that I was—well, to speak plainly, shocked. And I suppose I must have shown it (though I tried not to) because my companion laughed.

"No," she said. "I see you haven't. Well, each to her taste. I am not a Puritan myself, but I am not one of those who sneer at Puritans. I sometimes wish I was different, but one can't help the way one's made. And I was made like that."

We had been walking slowly, and now came to one of the other tents. In it were a dozen or so beds, all occupied. And the occupants seemed all to be boys, some of them almost children. Some were bandaged. One had his arms stretched straight out and bound to a strip of wood—he looked as if he were crucified. Yet he smiled up at us as we came along, and made some feeble joke.

"Poor lad, he has been like that over a fortnight," my companion said when we were out of earshot. "Everything has to be done for him, even to cleaning his teeth. Yet he never grumbles or curses his luck, as some of them do. Wonderful, isn't it? And actually he is always cheerful. The M.O. thinks he may recover the use of his arms, but he isn't sure. There's nothing any of us wouldn't do for that boy. Bloody, I call it. But then it's a bloody war."

She introduced me to some of the other nurses. All were quite young, and friendly. Some of the things they said startled me, and some of their adjectives were astonishing. Yet under it all, I instinctively felt, lay sympathy and goodness and a determination to do their best to alleviate these poor fellows' suffering. Indeed I believe that not one of those girls, flighty and irresponsible as they were on the surface, would not have risked her life for any one of those wounded officers had it become necessary to do so.

To me it was all strange and very interesting. What, I wondered, would our respectable people at home have said or thought had they seen those girls as I saw them, or listened to their conversation? How horrified they would have been. I thought of my father and of my mother. My mother! I tried to picture my mother in my shoes in that hospital, but failed. I think she would have fainted. My father. Well, he was a man of the world, or had been. Though a padre, he would have understood and made allowances. But some of the young curates I had met at home, and some of those old rectors, and a bishop or two whose views I had heard expressed in my father's library—not one of them would have failed to condemn my new friends.

The duties of the sisters I soon discovered to be extremely uncongenial; yet they faced them without a murmur. There was only one orderly, and consequently the nurses had to perform menial tasks—floor scrubbing, slop emptying and so on. In addition, most of the patients needed constant attention, and all beds had to be made before seven o'clock in the morning. Daily fresh victims arrived, and others were sent home to England.

Not very many of the menial tasks fell to my share, for which I felt supremely grateful. Only one person annoyed me, and that was the young M.O. From the day I met him first he began to cast sheep's eyes at me, a thing I hated. If only he had possessed the instincts of what is called a gentleman his company might have been endurable, but unfortunately such instincts were foreign to him. The nurses all disliked him—with one exception. Why she did not dislike him—or rather, why she put up with him—I discovered later. You will have gathered that these sisters and their matron were anything but prudes, yet even they disliked "funny" stories with no point in them but their filth. And in those stories this young M.O. specialized. He seemed to revel in them and had not intelligence enough to recognize how we all detested them. During the whole of the four years I served in France he was the only M.O. I met who behaved like that. Many made love to me, but none, fortunately, had minds like sewer rats or tried to show me odious photographs.

For quite a long time I stayed in that hospital. Canvas is a disagreeable thing to sleep under. In hot weather it is too hot and very stuffy. In cold weather it cannot be heated properly, so that all one's belongings get damp and remain so. The nurses all worked splendidly.

One day the matron sent for me.

"Darling," she said in a queer voice, "I am going to lose you. Everything is to be changed here. These tents are coming down and there is to be a new hospital. I am going somewhere up the line, I believe. You are to go to Rouen. Have you ever been there? Well, you will like it. But I shall miss you terribly. You have done so well and been such a help. And the sisters all like you, though sometimes they call you 'the little Puritan!' I wonder how long you will remain a Puritan? A parson's daughter, aren't you?"

I said I was.

"Clergymen's daughters," she laughed. "They are proverbially—but no, I mustn't shock you. My father was not a parson. He was a plumber. Fact. But a church-going plumber. That's why I went on the stage—I couldn't stick my father's pie, or what passes for pie. Then the stage fired me. Said I had no talent. Which is God's truth, for I haven't. There was a boy on one tour same name as you. Very hot stuff—not a bit like you."

"What was he like?" I asked quickly.

"The girls called him a swab, and that about sums him up. Rather tall. Fair. And talked in rather a funny way—not a stammer, you'll understand, but a kind of lisp. When he was playing he somehow lost it."

"Was he any good? I mean, could he act at all?"

"Pretty fair, so far as I remember. But why do you want to know? Have you met him? Is he a friend of yours?"

"Not exactly," I said. "He happens to be a brother of mine."

"Your brother! Oh, I am sorry. I'd not have said all that if I'd known. How extraordinary. You're not a bit like him. I suppose he is a soldier now."

I was ashamed to tell the truth, so I said that probably he was—by now.

The nurses had already told me that the matron had been an actress; though they didn't know what sort of actress. Musical comedy, they surmised, seeing what "a scream" she was.

It was a wrench parting from them all. I had enjoyed being with them. I had learnt from them a lot of things, too, which I had not before dreamed existed or could happen. The fly in the ointment had been the young M.O. On the single occasion when he had tried to kiss me I had slapped his face. He had tried to kiss each nurse in turn, I afterwards discovered, and received a slap from each. He must have had the hide of a rhinoceros.

When a weasel crosses your path bad luck is supposed to follow. What happens when a weasel runs over your toes? That was my experience the first night I slept in the hospital tent on the hill on the rive gauche of the Seine at Rouen. After that I made the tent weasel-proof so far as possible.

There could hardly be a greater contrast than the contrast which existed between the little temporary hospital which I had just left and the great hospital at Rouen, or rather row of hospitals. Run on strictly military lines, organized like a departmental stores, with a matron (or was she second in command?) whose acumen outrivalled that of any man I have ever met—and I have been intimate with very clever men since those early war years—she was emphatically the Right Woman in the Right Place.

Nothing excited her. Nothing even flustered her. She could interview half a dozen people at the same time and not miss a point in any of their arguments. She spoke slowly and with deliberation, with a soft and very charming accent, was courteous to everybody—though some of the Brass Hats she had to deal with must have tried her patience sorely—and never forgot anything. She was one of those rare people who, if they tell you they are going to do a thing or see to something, will, you know for certain, do it or see to it at once. She ought to have been managing director of some commercial organization. Yet before the war, so I was credibly informed, she had been apprenticed to a hat shop in London's West End!

If the nurses where I had been knew how to enjoy themselves, those in Rouen knew how to work even harder—and by nurses I mean also the V.A.D.'s. To all intents they worked round the clock on the days when fresh convoys of wounded came down the line. And so did the M.O.'s, of whom I shall have more to say later.

The women were drawn from all ranks of the community. Shop girls, domestic servants of the better class, well-to-do girls and women who before the war had probably never done a stroke of work in their lives, women with titles, and many others mingled on the same social plane. How many there were I cannot say, but in that huge hospital camp there must have been at least a hundred, in addition to many male orderlies. There was friction, of course. No mass gathering of that size composed almost wholly of women could have lived in complete harmony. The only thing which bored me was the incessant talk, the eternal chatter about men. I had a few officer friends in the town, and if ever I was seen with one of them, or it became known that I was going to lunch or dine with one or more of them, there was the inevitable remark with a meaning snigger—"Ah, I saw you!" or "We know where you dined last night!" or "Who's the lovely man you were with yesterday?" and so on, followed by silly chaff.




CHAPTER III

In Rouen I had my first proposal of marriage. A Colonel. Actually.

He was only passing through Rouen, and looked about forty. He said he had a moor in Scotland and all sorts of other nice things; but somehow he didn't attract me, though he certainly knew how to make love. I was glad it was after I had refused him, and not before, that I saw him one night coming out of a well-known horrible establishment near the Rue Grosse Horloge. I suppose that according to the accepted standards of alleged morality the knowledge that he frequented a place of that sort should have made me reject him at once if I had not already done so. But it would not have. I had learned so much, grown so much wiser since I had quitted my father's sheltered Rectory, that an incident of that nature seemed hardly to matter. I had come to recognize the truth of my father's assurance that "war makes some men beasts, at any rate for a time."

It was soon after this that I was detailed to meet some of the trains arriving at Rouen with wounded from the casualty clearing stations. The sights one saw daily in the hospital were harrowing enough, but the spectacle of those trains packed with men, sometimes half cut to pieces, some of them with features mangled beyond recognition, upset me far more. Or would have done so had I allowed myself to become upset. But a thing we nurses had quickly learned was never to betray our feelings. Some of our patients—I know this because some of them told me—imagined that we were hard and devoid of sympathy because we seemed to be so indifferent to their sufferings.

Indifferent! If only they had known! Often when alone after completing my duties I would cry my eyes out for quite a long time, and I know that other nurses did the same. But nothing would have induced us to let this be discovered if we could help it. The matron would have been down on us, too, telling us that we were not fit to be nurses—though I believe she was just as "weak" as any of us, had the truth been known.

At about this time I had a letter from my actor brother. The leading man in his company had joined up, and he, Lionel, was playing lead in some futile musical comedy. He wrote in high glee about this "bit of luck" as he called it, and his rise in salary; then went on to hope that I was "not having too rough a time among all those poor wounded devils." Then he explained at length how impossible it still was for him to join the army, adding that probably his company would later on come out to France "to give some shows for the fighting boys," so that after all he would then be "doing his bit ... even though not actually fighting. We can't all do the donkey work, can we? And men like me are not fitted for that kind of thing—it isn't in our blood...."

I rarely lose my temper, but that letter made me almost hysterical. "Horrible little swab," I remember exclaiming aloud. "If my mother were not a virtuous woman I would swear he was a bastard got by some other father."

Then came another letter. My lawyer brother, Tom, who long before had come all the way from Hong Kong to do his bit, wrote that he had been accepted for the Kite Balloon Section. At last he had been given a commission, though three times the War Office had snubbed him when he applied for a job. I was not surprised to hear that, because I had heard so many temporary officers say the same thing. And it had always puzzled me. Middle-aged men—Tom was under thirty—gave up important posts because they felt they must try to help England in her great struggle. They went to the War Office, with or without an introduction, expecting to be metaphorically shaken by the hand and congratulated, and were met instead with a stony stare by some jumped-up official or jack-in-office who looked them up and down and then sometimes inquired superciliously "of what use they thought they would be in the army!" Later, of course, when men came to be badly needed, that attitude of the War Office gentlemen changed considerably. I don't speak from personal experience, naturally. But the officers who told me this were men whose statements I trust implicitly.

When I first arrived in Rouen the hospital nurses and sisters were granted much liberty. When off duty we could do just as we pleased without being questioned or interfered with. At that time if a nurse returned from the town after midnight, nobody said anything. But after a while some of the nurses began to abuse these privileges, and the crux came when one of them allowed an officer to motor her into Paris in a Government car, which crashed into a French camion.

The usual inquiry followed, and all the hospital regulations were tightened up, and nurses had to be back in hospital by ten or eleven at night, or earlier. Then some silly girls were seen smoking cigarettes in a café one afternoon with several officers, and slightly inebriated. Noticed by Brass Hats, of all people. Again the hospital rules became stricter. One or two more ill-advised acts by foolish nurses and we all lost most of our privileges, and the hospital came to resemble a penitentiary, or rather a school for irresponsible children.

I liked nursing the men better than nursing officers, and I think that most of us did. The men were so obedient and so easy to manage, also they made no bones about expressing their gratitude—they rather overdid this sometimes and made one feel embarrassed. The officers—well, of course some of them were all right, but some emphatically were not, I mean those among them who were convalescent or nearly so. Their attempts at flirtation or openly making love were so crude, and some of their remarks so coarse. They seemed to think that because we were nurses we could be spoken to as though we were chorus girls; though why chorus girls should, when talked to like that, be expected not to take offence, I have never been able to understand. Some went so far as to order us about like servants.

"You know, my dear," a young captain said to me one day, "I was always given to understand that it was infra dig for a girl calling herself a lady to take on a job like yours. I wonder you do it. Why do you do it? Out to have some fun, I suppose—expect to catch an officer and marry him, eh? Oh, don't try to bluff me! I know what you girls are after, particularly a pretty girl like you," and he gave a wink with an odious meaning in it. I had nursed him for ten days or more. Yet when he said that I could have hit him.

Nevertheless, what he said was not wholly without truth. I know that some of the girls and women who joined up so proudly did so chiefly in the hope of getting excitement and having a good time and meeting lots of "desirable" men, as they called them. This I know because some of them used to boast about it. Some of the Fashionable Society women who became V.A.D.'s when that had come to be "the right thing to do" (and not before), also wanted excitement. They would not have helped if only the middle classes had been helping. They got a thrill, too, through seeing their portraits in papers like the Tatler and the Sketch, with a caption (I think it is called) saying they had become "ardent war-workers somewhere in France," or something of the kind.

Not all the fashionable women were of that type, of course. Indeed some of them worked splendidly. Unfortunately, those who did not were the ones who got talked about and gave rise to the many stories told at the Bases about the Society nurses and other Society war-workers. That a cynic posted a notice above his bed, "I am too ill to be nursed," is probably untrue.

I hoped to remain a long time in Rouen, but one of the nurses—incidentally a well-known Society woman—having developed an unpleasant infatuation for me which I knew must lead to trouble if allowed to continue, I applied for a transfer.

"What's this I hear about your wanting to leave us?" a friendly M.O. said to me as we sat in the Café Victor one afternoon, sampling a new apéritif which he said he had just invented. "Why do you want to go? We like having you here, and you understand your job."

To explain would have been embarrassing, so I had to invent an excuse.

"The incessant rain here day after day and night after night gives me rheumatism," I replied. "They have good reason to call this town le pot de Rouen."

"I wonder if I could persuade you to stay," he went on, after a pause. "If you go you will make at least one man miserable."

I gave him a quick look. Surely the old fellow—he was a senior officer aged about fifty-four—was not going to attempt love-making! I felt relieved when he continued:

"That good-looking boy in N ward who was shot near the groin is in love with you, what is called head over heels in love. He told me so—his father is a friend of mine, and I have known the boy since he first went to Marlborough, so he makes rather a confidant of me. He has a chance of recovery, but is in great pain at present, and mentally distressed as well. If you go you will lessen his chance of recovery, because he will worry so. If you stay, the fact of his seeing you every day will help his recovery. So what about it?"

I began to wish that I had been born with a face like a gargoyle. Say what you like, good looks are a handicap in the nursing profession. When patients are very ill they don't care what you look like. But when they begin to recover they either stare you out of countenance every time you go near them (though too shy to say anything), or they set out to make love to you—and occasionally make odious propositions.

The lad in N ward, a subaltern not long from school, could at first do nothing but stare. I had felt him tremble while I dressed his wound, but supposed his trembling to be due to pain. On one of the few occasions when he had spoken he had told me that he did not care if he lived or died. He would be lame for the rest of his life, he knew, and, what was worse in his eyes, unable to ride. It seemed that before the war he had been a promising steeplechase rider—the only form of sport he cared about, he said.

That evening he said the same to me again—that he did not care if he lived or died. This time I was ready for him.

"Then I think you are very selfish," I replied, instead of expressing sympathy or trying to cheer him up. "My job here is to get you well. Do you suppose I gave up all my home amusements and comforts to come out to France just to see people die? I came out meaning to do my best to prevent any patient from dying who was put under my care. If you die I shall feel that I have failed, that my efforts to make you recover have been wasted. And you are a nice boy—I like you very much, really, perhaps more than you think. Wouldn't you like to do something to please me?"

His eyes brightened at once, and he smiled. The old M.O. had been right about his looks, though I had never particularly noticed them before. He put out his hand.

"I would do anything for you, sister," he exclaimed with burning eyes. "Tell me what you want."

"I want you to try to recover, to make up your mind that you will recover—for my sake. Besides, if you let yourself die—there is no reason why you should die, you are not mortally wounded—it will mean a black mark for me. The M.O. and the matron and everybody else in authority here will think, and perhaps say, that if I had attended to you better you would not have died, that it was owing partly to my negligence..."

"Look here," he interrupted, "don't talk like that. You know as well as I do that nobody could have nursed me better than you have, or been kinder, or—or..."

"Then you will try? You'll never say again that you don't care if you die?"

"I promise I won't. I swear it. I'll get well just to show you—just to please you...."

Then, carried away for an instant by his emotion, he put up both arms.

"Sister, I wish to God you'd kiss me! I've been wishing it ever since I first saw you. Just once. Won't you?"

It was almost dark, and a screen hid part of the ward. I glanced to right and left, then bent down and kissed him several times—on the lips. I felt his whole body thrill. I know that during those brief moments his pain was forgotten. When I straightened myself again there were tears in his eyes.

"You darling!" I heard him whisper.

Was it a mean trick, seeing that I didn't love him, though I liked him well enough? I think not. For it had the desired effect. From that day onward he was quite a different person. He told me that now he had something to live for, also that apart from that he was determined not to "let me down" by letting himself die.

Some weeks later he was invalided home, and from home he wrote to me almost every day. In one of his last letters he told me that though lame he was to be sent up the line again.

A month after that I read that he had been killed in action.

The news should have given me a shock. If any friend of mine were killed to-day in any sort of accident I should feel terribly upset. But somehow during the war death did not seem to count. One's sensibility seemed to be blunted—atrophied. One danced with a man to-night, and a few nights later he would be brought in on a stretcher. Next day he would be dead. Yet one didn't grieve. Perhaps one had not time to grieve. Or one didn't think. The only way to ensure any sort of peace of mind during the war was never to think.

"You are no good at any war job if you start thinking," a sniper said to me one day, with a laugh. "I discover a Boche through my glass, and cautiously raise my rifle and draw a bead on him and fire and see him crumple up—if I am lucky. If before firing I began to ponder, wonder who the fellow was, what his occupation in civil life had been, if he had wife and children and a happy home, and then pictured to myself his wife and children receiving the news of his death, and reflected that all that misery would be owing to me—well, I couldn't pull the trigger, I just couldn't. Besides, I might be all wrong. The man might be some unconscionable rogue, or a blighter who beat his wife and neglected his children, or he might be a hopeless drunkard or an unspeakable blackguard. And if I didn't kill him he would, as likely as not, kill me and so—well, there you are: shoot first and shoot quick, that's my motto."

A thing which always disgusted me—I came across a good deal of it later on when driving an ambulance—was what the soldiers used to call "booby tricks." A broken-down lorry would be set like a trap with a bomb or some explosive, and then left. When the enemy came upon it and began to try to move it they would, of course, pull the lever. Instantly the bomb would explode and the men all be blown to pieces, or at any rate killed. Another booby trick consisted in half-starving a prisoner and then giving him a tin of preserved meat into which air had been admitted so that the meat had gone bad. Ravenously the poor wretch would devour the meat, and a little later he would die in agony. I don't say who did that sort of thing, we or the Boches, or if both did it. All I say is that it was done.

"All is fair in love and War." I should like to see the man who invented that slogan flogged to death. He is to blame for unutterable horrors.

A more mixed set of men I have never come across than the officers in the Great War; and since the Armistice I have travelled in many countries and met all sorts and kinds of men, also women.

About two gentlemen to every five who were not gentlemen I should say was approximately the average. And by gentlemen I don't mean necessarily Public school men or the sons of the nobility or the aristocracy. There were gentlemen—Nature's gentlemen—drawn from all classes—shop assistants, clerks, manual labourers and so on. I remember a little man who had been shot through both cheeks telling me that from the age of fourteen he had had his nose to the grindstone in a boot repairing shop. He had never had an opportunity to play any games or indulge in those forms of sport which are supposed to—and undoubtedly do—help to "make a man" of young men by giving them self-confidence, courage, a sense of fair play, and rendering them indifferent to risks and hard knocks. At eighteen he had enlisted in a line regiment. So efficient did he prove himself to be, and so regardless of danger, also so cool-headed in moments of crisis, that within eighteen months he was promoted sergeant-major, and nine months later granted a commission. The things he had done were told to me by a friend of his in the same ward—twice he had saved lives at the risk of losing his own, and on each occasion he had been wounded. But these acts of gallantry had been overlooked—as so many hundreds of acts of gallantry were—so he got no special decoration. He was one of the most considerate patients I nursed at any time during the war, and his father had been no higher in the social scale than under-keeper on a country gentleman's estate.

By contrast I recollect a rather dreadful person, a very rich man, who for twelve months early in the war was a M.L.O. (Military Landing Officer) at a Base. I can see his portly figure and red face still as he strutted up and down the quay in his brass hat, cursing everybody when he didn't damn them, and doing all he could to display his tin-pot authority. If troops about to land happened to be singing, he would bellow at them to desist, and put one or two under arrest if they failed to stop at once. Dogs were not allowed to be landed—many of the men loved dogs and used often to try to smuggle them into France—and any dog found by him was at once thrown into the river.

That man "carried on" up and down that quay every day for a year, or perhaps rather longer. The only shells he ever saw were those being off-loaded from the ships. The only shells he ever heard explode exploded one hundred or more miles away and were only occasionally audible. Yet eventually he was awarded a D.S.O. and went home to England. Before the war I had looked upon holders of a D.S.O. with a sort of awe, and considered them to be all heroes. The war dispelled that illusion.

One matron under whom I served bore a striking resemblance to some of those Pompous Persons. I must not mention which hospital she was in, for even after a lapse of years the arm of the libel law can strike. It was a hospital for "other ranks," and among the patients was a man of over sixty who, whilst driving a lorry of ammunition up the line, had been blown up and blinded in one eye. He was dreadfully depressed, not so much at the loss of his eye as through disappointment at his being no longer able to carry on. After remaining a week almost in silence he ventured to make some feeble joke.

"Stop that, please!" snapped the matron. "You are not expected to be funny in a Red Cross hospital."

The old fellow collapsed. And I never heard him speak again.




CHAPTER IV

After my time in Rouen I was transferred temporarily to Abbeville, about sixty miles north-east of Rouen, and nearer to the danger zone. I had remained in Rouen because the Society nurse who had bothered me had been transferred elsewhere.

Before that I had been home on leave, and what I had seen at home had disgusted me.

For quite a large section of the people one met seemed to be only dimly aware that a war was in progress. Young men, many of whom one suspected must be fit to serve, were everywhere. Foolish women and girls amused themselves by pushing white feathers into the hands of these men indiscriminately. As a result, men quite unfit to serve were shamed into enlisting, while others, fit to serve, laughed at the women or insulted them.

A friend of mine, a young solicitor, whose health and constitution were extremely poor, driven half frantic by these white-feather cranks, applied for a commission. Almost immediately he was sent to France. In a few months he was dead.

Then, I found that in England some unintelligent person had coined a shibboleth, "Business as usual," hoping thereby to prevent panic, forgetful of the fact that the British Nation has never been known to panic. Consequently people tried more and more to forget there was a war, while devoting their energy to seeing how much money they could make during the war. And what fortunes some of them amassed, had already amassed when I went home on leave!

It was amazing. Two acquaintances of mine in the imported meat trade made no pretence of hating the war. They told me openly that they "hoped it would last for years and years." Both were of military age and appeared to be in the best of health—though they may not have been. But they might at least have refrained from expressing their joy so freely.

A phrase one heard parroted on all sides was, "There's a war on." I think it started in the music-halls, still cesspools of slushy sentimental patriotism and blatant cock-suredness. One song in particular, bawled everywhere, began with the line, "It's a fine thing to see them marching away..." and ended with something about missing them during their absence and kissing them on their return. Most unappetizing young women sang it in the halls, and fearsome females screeched it at charity concerts and other "in-aid-of" entertainments to raise funds to buy cigarettes or socks or shirts or woolly comforters for "the dear boys."

"There's a war on" became an excuse for every sort of inattention, inefficiency, carelessness, slackness and even rudeness. If an order given to a shop were not attended to, a supercilious assistant would shrug his shoulders and tell you "There's a war on." If complaint were lodged about a parcel lost in the post, the pert female would retort, "Perhaps you forget there's a war on." It was the same everywhere.

One of the first of my acquaintances I met on arriving in London on leave exclaimed with a little cackle of laughter, "Had a good time, darling? I suppose you know there's a war on!"

Then she went on to gush about all she had been doing, the fun she had been having, and how, after all, "though of course war must be horrid," it had its compensations.

"Had a good time?" How often that was said to me during that fortnight's leave, and how it enraged me. Good time! Good God!

Sometimes I tried to tell them about the scores of poor fellows one had tended in the hospitals; but they hardly listened. Or if they did it was only to try afterwards to cap what one had told them by relating what they themselves had been doing in the way of war "work" at home—singing at concerts, playing in amateur theatricals, attending work meetings, organizing balls, collecting in the streets on flag days, writing letters to soldiers at the front—in the hope, of course, of getting exciting or affectionate replies.

Back in my old home in the Midlands for a few days, I found my mother as placid as usual.

"Well, have you enjoyed yourself, dear?" was her first remark after kissing me on the forehead. "You must tell us all about what you have been doing and how you liked it and what the war is really like. I hear from Lionel sometimes. He has been out there too, you know, with his company, 'doing his bit,' as he says, though of course he can't fight. Last week he wrote and told me of the wonderful success his 'show,' as he calls it, had up quite near the front line. He could hear the fighting quite well, he said, and it thrilled him and..."

That was more than I could bear. Had my father not cut in at that moment I don't know what would have happened. My father was so tactful, seemed always to know exactly what was passing through my mind. He looked sadder, older, than when I had seen him last. Once when we were alone together he said to me quite simply:

"Connie, never forget that you can always tell me everything—though I am a parson."

I knew so well what he meant, what was in his mind. Later I had reason to thank God I had a father who "understood." If more fathers (and mothers) "understood" their daughters, how much less domestic misery there would be. But most of the girls I have met would rather die than reveal certain secrets to either of their parents; naturally, because if they did reveal them their parents would most likely turn them out into the street.

And parsons too. How strange many of them are. How lacking in imagination and comprehension. While on leave I went to see a nurse friend in a Red Cross hospital in London. I remembered she had been with me in Rouen when I went there first. It was a Sunday morning, and she told me that the "minister" from some church was to hold a short service in the main ward—he was just due to arrive. Would I mind attending the service too, as she would be compelled to?

After the service the minister said he would address a few words of consolation to the patients, all of them wounded officers. This he did by telling them in the course of his talk that their wounds came as a punishment for their sins, and that they might take it for granted that "the worst wounded among you have been the greatest sinners...."

This remark evoked splutters of laughter from many of the beds, and even "the greatest sinners" found it possible to smile grimly. When this Job's comforter had taken his departure the ward burst into loud laughter—all but the nurses, who were furious and expressed themselves very freely indeed—and their opinion of the minister. I don't think I had ever before or have ever since seen women quite so enraged. When I told my father about it he said things about some of his colleagues which were peppery and to the point.

I had looked forward to that fortnight's leave. But I was glad to get back to France. The smugness and the apathy and the lack of imagination of many of our people at home had made me feel uncharitable. They seemed to be unable to realize what was actually happening in France, and that the war was likely to last a year longer at least. And those ghouls making fortunes out of it—enjoying it! If only a few thousand Boches could effect a landing and show our people what war was really like, what a lot of good it would do, I thought. Even I had not yet seen more than the fringe of its horrors. I was soon to see more than the fringe.

Women always gossip, though they don't gossip more than men. Before two days had passed after my arrival at Abbeville I knew a lot about most of the senior officers stationed there, and about their amours. I also quickly learned that there had been some scandal regarding a young nurse whom I had been detailed to replace. I was not told her name, or any particulars.

But a day or two after that a note was brought to me. For some moments I could not think who it came from. Then all at once it dawned on me. I read the note again carefully. The writer gave an obscure little estaminet as her address, and begged me to come to see her.

Nurse T! The nurse in the Base hospital who had shocked me by asking me if I had "ever had a man."

I was shocked now—this time by her appearance. It had completely changed. I had to look at her hard for some moments.

Her face was drawn. Her arms were thin. Her eyes had an anxious, frightened expression. The little room she was in smelt unpleasant.

"You are a darling to come," she said, getting up out of her chair with some difficulty as I came into the room. "I heard you had been sent for to take my place...."

I was puzzled. Then light began to dawn.

"Take your place?" I said. "I had no idea I was taking your place. I didn't know even that you were not still at the Base where we first met."

"Then you don't know..."

"I don't know anything definite, but in the hospital here I have heard rumours—gossip."

"True gossip this time," she replied. "Well, it's no use crying now. I have been a fool, and what I have got I deserve."

"It doesn't show much—yet," I said with a quick glance at her figure.

"But quite enough to reveal the secret. Oh, what a bloody fool I have been!"

"Who was it? An officer, I suppose?"

She shook her head.

"Not a Tommy?"

"No."

"Not one of the alliés, surely—the sacred alliés!"

"Oh, no."

"Then who on earth..."

"Sit down here, darling, and listen to me. I hardly dare tell you, yet I feel I must. It was not a soldier."

"Not a soldier? But there are only soldiers here."

"An actor. English."

"An actor! My word, what a cur! A soldier might possibly be forgiven—even you might forgive him...."

She hid her face in her hands and began to cry.

"I can't tell you. Oh, I can't! I can't!"

"You must tell me. Tell me everything," I urged. "You surely don't think I should talk. Who was he? What was he like?"

She stared at me out of tear-dimmed eyes.

"You'll never forgive me. But mind—it was my fault. All my fault."

I went on pressing her to tell me, wondering why she should think it could matter to me who the man was. Finally she leant forward and whispered a name.

I can stand a good deal, but I confess that when she said that I really did see red. Lionel! He had been in France with his acting troup, that I knew. And—and—he had scraped acquaintance with Nurse T in St. Omer, and there, two days later, it had happened. I felt I wanted to strike out. My brother. My rotten brother who hadn't the grit to fight for his country had nevertheless been "doing his bit in France," as my mother had said. His bit! God!

"Don't turn on me, Connie," I heard a piteous voice saying. "I swear it was my fault. I saw he was attracted by me and I encouraged him—somehow I attract men, though I am so plain. And when I see that a man is like that I can't help egging him on. I don't know why. I have done it as long as I can remember—it must be a mental kink, call it madness if you like. But I liked you so much the first time we met, and then came to look on you as a real friend, and then when I heard that you were to take my place here after I had been dismissed, ordered home, I thought it would be only fair that you should know the whole truth."

I couldn't say much. I felt too much upset, too furious with my brother. Not with this poor girl. The attitude she had adopted, her fear that I would "turn on her," was pathetic. I reassured her on that point.

"And what are your plans now?" I asked at last.

"I haven't any. I don't know what I shall do, for I have hardly any money."

"Do your people know?"

"My people! Heaven forbid! That is the difficulty. I can't go home in the state I am in, and I don't know where to go. My people are middle-class folk living in Surbiton, and if they knew I was in trouble—in this way..."

She didn't finish, but began to sob again. It was then that a thought came to me.

"Perhaps I could help you," I said. "I have an idea."

She brightened.

"I think my father might help you."

"Your father? I thought your father was a parson."

"He is, but..."

"Oh, don't. No parsons for me. I had enough of parsons at home."

"Listen," I said almost angrily. "My father is not like other parsons—not like any padre I have ever met or heard of. I will tell him what has happened—and exactly how it came about. I won't mention my brother, because the knowledge would upset him so. My father will help you to get through this business without any of your people or anybody else knowing or suspecting. He is like that. He knows what human nature is. If more padres were like him the world would be a happier place to live in."

Impulsively she got out of her chair, and came over and kissed me.

"You are an angel!" she exclaimed. "I don't believe there is another woman like you in the world! I only wish I could show my gratitude."

We went on talking for a little while, and then I left her. That night I wrote to my father.

Abbeville was an uninteresting place, and I was glad to be sent to Amiens after two months. I was gradually getting nearer to the danger zone, and I remember thinking how curious it was that the nearer one approached the danger zone the more friendly, or "matey"—to use the ugly modern word—everybody became. The "atmosphere" of Amiens was different from that of Abbeville, and very different from the Rouen "atmosphere."

For instance, in Rouen if a subaltern had the effrontery to wish a senior officer good morning before the senior officer condescended to wish him good morning, unless the senior officer were a very exceptional person he would "tick off" that presumptuous subaltern severely. Not so in Amiens. There I many times saw subalterns commit that gross breach of discipline, or whatever it may be, and the senior officer always responded quite pleasantly. Again, in the first Base I had been stationed in, and in Rouen or Abbeville, you would never see a subaltern alone in the company of a major, less still in the company of a colonel. If a colonel or a major invited a subaltern to a meal in a restaurant, there would always be a third person present who was of higher rank than subaltern. But at Amiens it was no unusual thing to see a subaltern and a captain or a major or a colonel lunching together alone, and I don't think that anybody thought the less of the superior officer for being "matey" with his inferior—in rank.

I had learnt how to drive a car. Two of the drivers had taught me, and I had gradually become fired with ambition to give up nursing and become a driver—an ambulance driver if possible.

Nursing was all very well, but it had never really appealed to me. One had all the time to keep one's feelings under such strict control, and that I found extremely difficult. And naturally it would never have done for nurses to have betrayed any sort of emotion. Even in the French hospitals any emotional display on the part of a nurse was at once sternly suppressed.

For the first time I understood how those lads at home felt who "wanted to see some of the fun."

Fun! I was to see more of it than I wanted.

Influence was of great use during the first two years of the war, though of less use later on. I wrote to Lord Carrick, whom I had seen at the Deptford Cattle Market whilst on leave. He was directing supplies and transport there, and I remember seeing him in his shirt-sleeves hustling great packing-cases one day when there was a rush, to the intense astonishment of the civilian labourers and dock hands employed.

"Fancy 'is Lordship doing a thing like that!" I recollect one of them exclaiming to another; and both appeared to be rather shocked that "the Earl," as they called him, should so debase himself! Lord Carrick's sister, Lady Kathleen Lindsay, was in charge of some hundreds of girls employed in packing rations, and I had been told that the War Office thought highly of her ability, and that the women's organizations would do almost anything she asked. I had seen her in the hunting-field in Ireland, too, on more than one occasion in pre-war days.

But I got a nasty snub. My letter found its way to some subordinate, who wrote curtly that I had no business to write to Lord Carrick, that I ought to have applied to my C.O., or to some women's organization—I forget which—if I wanted to drive an ambulance.

Letters took a long time to reach their destination, or perhaps the "Passed to you, please," many times repeated, was the reason why replies were so long delayed. So, while waiting impatiently, I carried on in two hospitals, where more and more wounded came pouring in. A case which upset me considerably was that of a lad who was led in one day with both hands blown off. He had come out from England only a few weeks before, he told me while I was nursing him, and in civil life had been an experimental chemist, or rather apprenticed to one. He had invented a bomb which he considered to be an improvement on the Mills bomb, and hoped that the War Office would adopt it if it proved satisfactory in the field. Some of these bombs he had brought with him surreptitiously, and almost the first he threw, or tried to throw, blew his hands off. He was almost in tears when he told me all this "in strict confidence," and seemed to be less upset at losing his hands than at the failure of his invention.

"My people are frightfully hard up," he ended, "and I thought I should make a fortune for them with these bloody bombs."

He stared at me very hard when I smiled at this remark, then, to my amazement, blurted out:

"Nurse, you are frightfully pretty! I wish to God I hadn't lost my hands so that I could touch your hair. I have rotten luck all round. Won't you let me kiss you?"

Such a lot of patients seemed to want to be kissed—kissed even by nurses who were quite plain. But then so many of them were almost babies. I suppose that kisses reminded them of home and of their mammies. The old men who wanted to be kissed mostly revolted me. Horrible old satyrs. I think there are few things more odious than dried-up old men who leer at and ogle you and finally try to paw you. They have no control over their feelings; at any rate they had none during the war. I had experiences which even now make me almost shudder when I think of them. Of course the war was to blame. It made some men sexually mad.




CHAPTER V

I kept no diary or notes during the war, unfortunately, so what I write is only what I can remember—incidents which crowd in upon me in quick succession.

One afternoon somebody knocked at my door. The nurse who came in had been in France only a few weeks, and from the first had seemed to take a fancy to me—or so I thought.

"I expected to find you having tea," she said, "and I am dying for a cup. I hope you don't mind my butting in uninvited?"

For a little while we chatted about nothing in particular, and then suddenly she remarked:

"Didn't I hear you say last week, B——, that you are hard up?" Christian names were rarely used.

"I don't remember saying so," I answered, "but as I generally am hard up I dare say I did. Who did I say it to?"

"I forget. But that doesn't matter. It struck me afterwards that perhaps I might help you to—to become less hard up, and that is partly why I have come here now."

Astonished, and rather puzzled, I asked her to explain.

"Your father is a parson, isn't he? And so I suppose he has a big family."

I told her the truth.

"I have five brothers and four sisters," she said, smiling. "But we are not hard up. Rather the other way. You see, my father is a financier."

"Oh, in the City."

"Well no, not exactly. In Shepherd's Bush. That's where his office is. We live in Putney."

"I see," I said, beginning, as I thought, to get her meaning. "And you think your father might put me on to a good thing or two—tell me what shares to buy, and so on."

For an instant she looked embarrassed.

"I didn't mean that—exactly. He isn't a stockbroker, you understand. He advances money."

"Oh, a money-len..." I checked myself.

"So if you are pressed for money, dear," she went on, pretending not to have heard, "I thought that perhaps you would like me to speak to him about you—I am sure he would make you an advance on your note of hand if I asked him to. He is ever so good that way."

I did not know whether to be annoyed, or treat the thing as a joke, or stand on whatever dignity I possess, and thank her coldly while declining the offer. I had met many sorts of women since the war started, but this was my first experience of a moneylender's daughter.

"It is very thoughtful of you," I said after some moments' hesitation, "but I couldn't think of letting you take all that trouble on my account. Why should you?"

"Because," she answered with delightful candour, "my father allows me a commission on people I bring to him who want financing—that is, if anything comes of the introduction. So you would be doing me a good turn."

She said this with such naïveté, was so obviously unable to see the humour in her suggestion, that I almost laughed. A hospital nurse out to do her bit, doing a bit at the same time for her father and a bit for herself!...

Later I discovered that she had made the same proposal to several of the other nurses. And she had confided to one of them that her brother was a batman who used to lend money to the officer he looked after! Had that officer been one of the wrong sort he could, of course, have placed the man under arrest and avoided repaying the loan!

I was still a V.A.D., for no order for my transfer to the ambulance corps had yet come through. The more I saw of wounded men, their courage and their patience, the more my admiration for men, as a body, grew. Would women have borne those frightful wounds with as much fortitude and so few complaints, I asked myself? True, women endured the agonies of child-birth with wonderful fortitude; but the pain of child-bearing, though no doubt intense, lasted for hours only—not for days and weeks and sometimes months.

Though I had many women friends, women, considered collectively, had never greatly appealed to me. Since I had been in France I had been afforded opportunities of studying my sex at close quarters and in great variety, and the study interested me because the nurses varied so greatly in type and temperament. I came to the conclusion, after careful consideration, that all women, or practically all, may be divided into two groups—the sexual and the non-sexual. There were nurses in the different hospitals I was in who would no more have allowed any man even to squeeze their hand than they would have let him come into their bedroom. Many of these nurses were quite young, and when watching them I sometimes wondered if they were any the happier for being so cautious—so prudish.

The sexual woman, I regret to have to admit, I found to be more sympathetic, more pleasant and companionable, more "human," though it ought, of course, not to have been so. Some of the girls who had been Girl Guides were exceptionally efficient—but what hard, unyielding natures they seemed to possess; what an atmosphere of militarism and red tape they exhaled! Quite as it should be, no doubt; but they were rather difficult to get on with. For when we women try to conduct ourselves exactly as though we were men and possessed the male mental outlook—as, I feel convinced, many of those ex-Girl Guides did—we almost always overdo it. We become what I have heard men call "hard-bitten."

Women who astonished me were the suffragettes who helped in the war. When the suffragettes had been chaining themselves to railings and setting houses on fire and biting policemen I had been in my early teens. At that time I had believed them all to be what my mother used to call "an utter disgrace to our sex." In France I met them in dozens in the hospitals and canteens and Y.W.C.A. and Y.M.C.A. huts, and elsewhere, and they were quite different from what I had imagined. Self-reliant, calm, capable, they got through their work quickly and without fuss. And they, too, were "human"—I can think of no better word. Perhaps those I met had not been militant, but they had been suffragettes of some sort. Their argument, I remember, was that as a rule you can't get much done in this world unless you make yourself an intolerable nuisance, and I believe that up to a point that is so.

At Amiens one could hear the guns rumbling at intervals, and the sound stirred something in my blood. I detested this war, had detested it from the first, yet when one came within sound of it...

I can't analyse what it was that then began to draw me, made me want to get closer still to the scene of activities. Other nurses told me that the sound of the guns affected them like that too. So I put in another application for transfer to the ambulances. I wanted to go forward. I felt I must go forward and see just what was happening away over there beyond the skyline. One seemed to become possessed by some sort of restrained excitement; obsessed by what may have been a kind of morbid curiosity.

I forget the name of the place where for the first time I saw shells bursting. They were a long way off—just puffs of white smoke which seemed to remain stationary for a minute in the still air and then gradually fade into nothingness. The driver of the ambulance turned to me:

"Frightened?" she asked.

It was not fright that had made my mouth go dry, I think. Rather it was excitement. I was on my way to bring back a Very Important Personage who had fallen seriously ill, and an hour or so later we came to a spot where a number of mules were lying dead. A.S.C. drivers stood examining them, while a sergeant-major made notes in a little book.

My driver stopped to ask what had happened. Then we saw that the mules all had their hoofs missing. They had not been killed by shells. One big shell had burst near them and blown off all their hoofs and the drivers had put them out of their agony with a revolver, we were told.

"Fifty or sixty quid apiece them hanimals cost," the sergeant-major remarked morosely.

An airplane hummed high in the air, a long way off. The sergeant-major scanned the blue sky with his field-glass. Presently I saw the thing—a speck almost invisible and apparently exactly over our heads.

"A Boche plane," he said calmly. "We'll be getting it again presently. You'd better go that way, miss," he added to my driver, pointing. "Eight or ten miles 'll make you quite safe, I shouldn't wonder. But it's a bad road, miss—bad surface."

Beautiful men, the men you hear people say "all women run after," also very young men, never greatly interested me even when I was nineteen. Most men are easily spoiled, and my experience of exceptionally good-looking men is that the majority become conceited and occasionally patronizing, while youths are either very shy and therefore difficult to make conversation with, or too self-opinionative and cock-sure. The men who attract me most, and always have, are "natural" men. They may be good-looking—generally they are not—but always they are considerate and courteous and gifted with a sense of humour and amusing to talk to, particularly if they have travelled much and mixed with all sorts of people. Above all they don't talk to impress one, or pretend to be what they are not.

Rupert C was that type of man. A.D.C. to the Important Personage whom I had come to retrieve, he attracted me at once. He had a nasty scar across his chin—he told me afterwards that he had cut his chin while shaving! But of course I knew that he lied. It was a shrapnel wound recently healed.

"I'll show you where you two will have to sleep," he said on the night we arrived; then conducted us to the only tent visible in the darkness. "It's the best I can do for you—but (he smiled) it has got a looking-glass!"

Not until daylight came did we discover that he had given us his bed and his tent and slept in the open wrapped up in a blanket!

Never before had I felt drawn towards any man as I was towards Captain C. That he looked rather hard at me I will allow, but not once that day or on any of the occasions when I met him afterwards did he attempt to become flirtatious. Always even-tempered, always cool and collected and "on the spot," he seemed to be as efficient at his job as he was considerate and unselfish. Later I was told that his men would do anything for him, and that did not surprise me.

During the time he remained in Amiens the knowledge that he was so near affected me strangely. Particularly at night, thoughts of him came to me—obsessed me. Until then I had always fallen asleep almost as my head touched the pillow; but now it was different. For an hour or two I would lie awake—thinking. And it was always only Rupert of whom I thought and of whom I dreamed. I tried to pull myself together. I told myself it was nothing more than foolish infatuation that I suffered from. Something seemed to keep on dinning it into my brain that at last I had really fallen in love, a condition I had always laughed at and never believed possible in my case. Passion, yes. I knew what it felt like to feel passionate. But that was quite another thing. Many of the girls I knew intimately had admitted that they were of passionate temperament. That nurse who had got herself into trouble I knew to be passionate almost past belief. But love! One read about it in books. One talked about it. One laughed and joked about it. A friend of mine had only recently wearied me with a description of the love she felt for some man or other, and I had tried to listen patiently, and now...

The crisis came when one of the sisters said to me one day:

"What's wrong with you, B——? Why are you so thoughtful, so absent-minded? You never used to be. I believe you are in love!"

I turned upon her. What I said I can't remember, but it made her cut me dead from then onward. Then one day I got a blow.

"On Monday I am being moved," Rupert said to me. We were dining together in a little estaminet. "They are sending me to Albert to rejoin my Company."

For several moments I couldn't speak. Nor could I look at him, though I felt his eyes upon me. At last I made an effort.

"I have been to Albert," was the only thing I could think of saying. His face was a blur when I tried to look at it. I knew that he must be noticing how wet my eyes were.

We were alone. He twisted himself round in his chair, to make sure that the door was shut. A moment later he stood behind me where I sat.

He had my face between his hands, his lips pressed my hair.

"Connie," he exclaimed, "Connie—haven't you realized?"

His voice had trembled.

"What do you mean?" I forced myself to ask.

"You are so different from all the women I have ever met. Lots of men have proposed to you, I suppose, but—but..."

"The only man who ever proposed to me was old enough to be my father," I said quickly.

"You don't know anything about me...."

"And don't want to...." I could hardly speak. "I thought you were indifferent to me—dear. I thought you liked me merely as a friend."

"My darling, I love you.... I have loved you all along. But I can't marry you...."

He must have felt me shiver—my head was pressed against his breast—for he went on hurriedly:

"My wife is insane—in an asylum—has been for seven years. She can never recover—never get better...."

I don't know what possessed me then. All I remember is that I got up and turned round and flung my arms about his neck. I believe that at that moment I, too, became mentally unbalanced. My will-power seemed to be gone. Never in my life had I felt like that before. It was as though a great wave of uncontrollable emotion and mad passion swept over me, blotting out all else. Nothing seemed to matter—except that mad desire—that exquisite yearning....

He tried to calm me, tried to argue, reminded me of what might happen if...

But I clung to him still. There was no holding back now. What might happen afterwards didn't matter. Only one thing mattered.

I loved him ... we loved each other....

The weeks which followed after he was gone were terrible. So often I had felt contempt—all women do who have retained their virginity—for girls who let men get them in their power. Yet with me it had been worse. Rupert had tried to restrain me. He had kept himself in check. I it had been who had forced him to give way at last; I who had more than surrendered myself. What must he think of me now that it was all over? Since that night I had not seen him again. Perhaps—probably—I never should see him again. And I loved him. Always should love him. That I knew. My own future seemed not to matter now.

"Think what might happen..." he had said. I still didn't want to think. I didn't care. Then I remembered my father's talk with me while I had been on leave, and that comforted me a little. My father would forgive me even if the worst should happen, as it had happened to that nurse. He knew what war was—what men were like in war-time. Men! No man's fault this time. Even if it had been any man's fault....

A patient feebly calling to me brought me back to earth. I went over to him. His eyes—I can see them still—had sunk deep into his head. The skin of his cheeks was pulled tight over the cheek-bones. Already the face resembled wax.

The windows of the ward were open, for the heat was insufferable. At intervals the thunder of the guns made them rattle. I gave him water, spoke to him soothingly.

"B——, matron want you."

The sister who had spoken passed on. I rather disliked her. Once she had asked me what my father was. I had told her, and she had laughed harshly.

"Another parson's daughter," she had said with a sneer. "My father always warns me against parsons' daughters—and against parsons too."

And several of the nurses near had murmured "Hear, hear."

The matron received me with a friendly smile.

"We are to lose you, B——," she said. "I am sorry. You have done good work. Only last week I was saying so to..." She named two people of importance who had been on a tour of inspection. "You go to the Ambulance Corps, I understand. I think you will be wasted there. V.A.D.'s who know their work are none too plentiful, I can assure you. You are to report first at Albert. Why, what is the matter?"

My face must have betrayed the sudden joy I felt. Rupert had not written, and I had not dared write to him. I felt sure he must be in Albert still.

"I am glad to go to the ambulances," I said. "I have been hospital nursing almost since the start, and I shall like the change."

"You think you will? Well, I hope you will, but I have my doubts. It must be risky work too when you get up near the line. But the women drivers are seldom sent there. And perhaps they will send you to a Base."




CHAPTER VI

The individual to whom I had been ordered to report in Albert was bent almost double at a low table, writing. She was alone, and went on writing.

After standing there for some minutes, waiting for her to speak, it struck me that she might be deaf and not have heard me enter.

"Are you the..." I began.

"Speaking," she snapped, without looking up, and still writing.

"I have come to report from..."

"Who are you and what do you want?"

Intentional rudeness always annoys me. This woman was, I could see, trying to ape the manner of a rude male senior officer—some senior officers were very rude.

Controlling my temper—how often one had to do that during those war years!—I gave my name and told her why I had reported.

"I know nothing at all about you?" she rapped out, at last looking up. "And we have plenty of drivers, thank you."

"Then what am I to do?"

"I am sure I don't know," and I felt her add mentally, "and don't care."

She was a sour-looking creature, about forty-four, with dark, beady eyes and thin, compressed lips. She wore a wedding-ring, and I remember the thought flashed through my mind, "What a dreadful life her poor husband must lead—if he survives."

Then something came over me, for without replying I sat down on the only chair, pulled out my cigarette-case and lit a cigarette. She smelt the smoke and looked up again from her writing.

"Are you aware what you are doing?" she shouted, glaring at me.

It was at this juncture that a major entered. He wore the R.A.M.C. badge. I had just time to crush my cigarette in my gloved hand before standing up, when he said:

"Excuse me, are you...?" He mentioned my name. "You were expected last night. You have to report in Dublin at once, —— Barracks."

That gave me a shock of bitter disappointment. And why, I wondered, should the order come from a M.O.? And how came it that the woman sitting there had not expected me, not even known my name?

Dublin! The last place I wanted to go to just then. So I should not see Rupert after all. I felt thoroughly disgruntled.

On the way to his orderly room—it looked like an orderly room—the major gave me further instructions. I gathered that in Dublin I was to go through an instructional course in driving, after which I should be expected to pass an examination. He was very friendly, and presently offered me some tea.

"You won't find that driving an ambulance is a beano," he remarked carelessly. "And you may be sent into the danger zone, if the war goes on much longer. Why don't you go on nursing?"

I explained that I felt I had done enough nursing, that I was tired of it.

"That's the worst of you people," he laughed. "All out for excitement and adventure. I doubt if one half of you V.A.D.'s and others are doing your bit just out of patriotism. Well, have it your own way. By the way, there's an officer here in" (he named a regiment and a company) "who would like to see you before you leave—Captain C. Says you are his cousin." He gave me a swift glance. "He'll be at the corner of the church in an hour's time," he went on, looking at his wrist-watch. "You can see the church from here," and he pointed out of the window. "It was really to tell you that that I came to look for you—I was told you had arrived. Your cousin is an old friend of mine," he added, and, though it may have been fancy, I thought his lip twitched as he said the word "cousin."

He gave me another cup of tea, chatting lightly about one thing and another, in particular asking me questions about myself, how long I had been in France....

"You were smoking a cigarette when I saw you just now," he said carelessly, and there was a twinkle in his blue eyes as he held his case out to me. "Do you usually sit down and cross your thighs and smoke cigarettes when reporting for duty?"

I felt I was turning red, and looked down at the floor, unable to answer.

"That old trout!" he exclaimed. "I bet she said she didn't know you were expected, or anything about you. She does that to everyone who reports to her. Yet I told her myself yesterday that a new driver would report from Amiens, and gave her your name. The women drivers here stand in terror of her, and if a driver happens to be good-looking.... But don't let's talk about that. Tell me—has your cousin, Captain C, known you long?"

"Not very long," I replied, trying to appear at ease.

"About how long? It is no business of mine, of course; only now that I have seen you I am rather astonished that Rupert should not have spoken about you to me before."

"As a matter of fact," I said, seeing that bluff would be wasted, "I met him some weeks ago, for the first time."

"Cousin on your mother's side, I suppose," he laughed. "But never mind. Only if he has other cousins I should like to meet them, that's all."

He changed the subject after that, and presently told me it was nearly six o'clock. Then he pointed the way to the church, and we parted.

I felt dreadfully nervous when Rupert appeared unexpectedly at a corner of a street. My heart was beating so that I could feel it—an unusual sensation for me. But at once he put me at my ease.

"What a darling you are to come," were his first words. "I doubted if you would. But I just had to send that message. I couldn't help it. I felt I must see you if I possibly could."

We turned into a side street, and walked slowly along. Somehow I couldn't speak. Soon we found ourselves outside the town, and close to the river.

"I wanted to write to you," he said suddenly. "Once or twice I almost did. Then I didn't because I couldn't very well without saying something about—about what happened; and in war-time one never knows who may read letters that go through the post. Ever since that night I have felt so distressed. I wondered what you must think of me, because, you know, I am not that sort. I thought you would never forgive me. Perhaps you haven't."

I cannot well write down what my answer was, or the rest of our conversation, until the subject changed. I had just told him how put out I felt at having to go to Ireland for a probationer drivers' course—I think it was called that—when he smiled.

"You have to thank me for going to Ireland," he said lightly. "I know what ambulance drivers out here have to go through, and I determined to keep you out of it as long as I could. Z" (he named the important personage to whom he had been A.D.C.) "is so influential that almost anything he says 'goes.' I hinted to him that a friend of mine would most likely be joining the women drivers and that I wished she could be kept at a Base.

"'Is she a skilled driver?' he asked.

"I said I knew that she was not—though I didn't know—and after considering for a minute he said:

"'She might do a refresher course somewhere. Why not Dublin, where they train motor-drivers?'

"Of course I at once approved of the idea, and he gave a queer little laugh. He always laughs like that when he means to do something for somebody, so I was not astonished when I happened to hear from one of the women's squadron leaders—yes, they call themselves that, among various other things—that after reporting here you were to report in Dublin."

I felt very much annoyed, yet at the same time very happy. He must care for me a great deal, I reflected, or he would not have done all that just out of (mistaken) kindness.

"I suppose you meant well," I said. "But I am dreadfully disappointed. I applied for a transfer only in order that I might be able to see what is really happening 'up there,' and now I shall see less than ever."

"I wouldn't worry," he answered. "I fear that nothing that I can do or say now will keep you long out of France; I am no longer A.D.C. to Z, you know. The war won't be over under another year or two, in my opinion, and God knows what will happen before the end. I believe that every able-bodied man and woman will be made to face the music. I understand that you leave here to-morrow morning."

"Yes. At nine o'clock."

We remained together until late. A bond of sympathy and mutual understanding seemed to have grown up between us. I believe that what had happened that night in Amiens had cemented our attachment. We talked about that night calmly enough now—the incident had broken down all barriers of reserve.

But at last we had to part. The parting from my brother on the outbreak of war had been painful enough, but it was as nothing by comparison with the agony I endured when Rupert told me that his time was up and that he must leave me. The question, "Shall I ever see him again?" kept forcing itself into my brain in spite of my efforts to dispel it. Oh, how I hated the war that night! More than I had ever before hated it. While I watched him through blurred eyes striding away along the moonlit road back towards the town, I felt that to me nothing in the world mattered so long as Rupert came safely through the campaign.

The train towards the Base travelled slowly—if travelled it could be called, and not "progressed." It carried mostly men homeward bound on leave, and convalescents, and remained stationary almost as often as it moved. At Havre came the usual formalities, then embarkation and that cautious creeping out to sea in total darkness, with safety jackets close at hand, for enemy submarines were exceptionally active just then.

"You bitch—may God strike you dead and all like you!"

A huge Irish hooligan stood shaking his fist at me as I stepped on to Kingstown pier. Abuse followed, also a cascade of filthy expletives, but nobody paid attention or seemed to mind. On the other hand nobody laughed, or seemed to be amused. Ireland's hatred of England had begun to rival Germany's.

I drove with my luggage to the Dolphin Hotel, where I had once or twice stayed before the war, for I knew the manager would remember me. I found him in the big room, where the rule at that time was that politics and the war must not be discussed, and anybody breaking the rule was made to stand drinks to everybody present. He metaphorically received me with open arms, and with that Irish hospitality which so soon afterwards ceased to exist amongst almost all classes in Ireland. In the afternoon I reported at —— Barracks.

"They had no business to send you here," said the C.O., after referring to some papers in a pile. "The Curragh is your destination. I'll ring up the adjutant there and tell her you are here. Meanwhile stay here and make yourself at home."

She looked me up and down with obvious approval.

"Are there more like you at home?" she said, smiling, using a catch-phrase then popular. "They are a mixed lot here, you know, so you'd better be careful. Where do you come from?"

I told her.

"So you've been in France. I wish I had. By the way, as you will go by road to the Curragh, and by night, I had better warn you. The Sinn Feiners rather hate us, and have a nasty habit of stretching a wire across any lonely road they think a Government car may come along in the dark, in the hope of wrecking the car or cutting the driver's head off. So far they have not succeeded in doing either, but you must be on your guard."

She smiled again, and once more looked hard at me. She was quite a handsome woman.

"It would be dreadful if a pretty head like yours were to be cut off," she said. "You are a lovely creature! Don't you find it awkward to be so good-looking—at a time like this? Don't the men embarrass you?"

I was embarrassed by the question, but replied with an assumption of self-confidence that I was capable of taking care of myself.

"So you think," she laughed. "We all think that at your age. I thought so myself—but was mistaken. Well, all good luck to you, dear. I'll see you later."

The girl who drove me to the Curragh was just under my own age. Thrilled at hearing that I had been in France, she put question after question to me, until I grew tired of answering her, and became silent.

"Do you happen to know Christabel Ellis?" she asked suddenly.

I knew her by name, of course. What woman war-worker did not know Christabel Ellis by name? She had been in Serbia and in Russia, and was now said to be driving a motor transport wagon on the British front in Flanders.

"She is a friend of mine," my companion continued, accelerating suddenly so that the lamps of the car blazed along the straight road. "I have written to ask her to wangle my going to France: the letter ought to reach her some time—but I fear she may refuse to 'wangle.' I am more than sick of Ireland. Been here eight months. It would be fun if we could go together, because you know the ropes and—and I like you. I suppose lots of men have been in love with you?"

Again that everlasting topic—men. Always those two topics—men—love. Could they never think of something else, these girls? Had they no other interests in life? Or—I occasionally wondered—was I different from other girls, did I lack something, some kind of emotional stimulant which they possessed?

Then a thought came to me. Brothers. I had four brothers. Perhaps that made a difference. Since then I have felt convinced that brothers do make a difference to any girl. Not that they keep her in order when she and they are young. I don't mean that. But whereas a girl without brothers generally grows up in the belief that all men are wonderful beings, the girl with brothers knows all about men's shortcomings, their faults and vices, their childishness and (often) their selfishness. So quite early in life she becomes disillusioned—if she ever were illusioned, which is doubtful.

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