The Sword of Deborah

ld you what H.Q.B.R.C.S. means; the D. of T. means Director of Transport; the F.A.N.Y. is the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, and the G.S.V.A.D. is the General Service Voluntary Aid Detachm

and the V.A.D.'s were in existence before the war, being amongst those who listened to the voice of Lord Roberts crying in the wilderness. They are all unpaid, voluntary workers, and they rank officially as officers. Among themselves, of course, they have their own officers, but socially, so to speak, every Fanny and V.A.D. is ranked with the officers of the

at confusion is very easy to the uninitiate. That is my only excuse for perpetrating the worst blunder that has probably ever

vation Army. Yet when I told the sad tale of my gaffe to the members of a V.A.D. convoy, they only seemed to think it must have been quite good for the Fan

ry far flatter that was yet more wholesome, and I loathe flat country. There is something in the perpetual repetition of form in the country round Calais, the endless sameness of its differences, that is peculiarly oppressive. Pearly skies blotted with paler clouds, endless rows of bare poplars, like the skeletons of dead flames, yellowish roads unwinding for ever, acres of unbroken and sickly green, of new-turned earth of

en, silent as shadows, flashing their sudden smiles, even more mysterious than their immobility, turned from their labour to watch the passing of the car; Kaffirs from South Africa, each with a white man's vote, voluntarily enlisted for the Empire, swung along; vividly dark Portug

confusedly whether they were all relations ... even my Western eye detected more difference between the types of Chinamen I met upon the road than in these Teutons. Of course, the round brimless cap has something to do with it, as has the close hair-crop, but when all is said, how much of a type they are, how amazingly so, as though they had all been bred to one purpose through generations! The ou

te satisfying; I remember the same feeling of satisfaction when on first going to New England I saw a frame house

all, for it is these things, this landscape, these varied races, this whole atmosphere, which goes to make life's background for eve

tude of the men towards the women than the attitude of the women towards their life, though it was none the less interesting for that. And here I may as well record, what I found at the beginning-and I saw no reason to reverse my judgment later on-and that was no trace of sex-jealousy in any department whatsoever. I only met genuine unemotional, level-headed admiration on

r the war ... when it's all over and there's nothing left but to go hom

do you

uble whether they marry or not. Th

nk and be told, I wondered whether it were true after all; later still came to what seems to me the

enormous Calais district was done entirely by the girls, of how, at this particular Fanny convoy to which we were going, they were raided practically every fine night, and that their camp was in about the "unhealthiest spot," as regarded raids, in the district. How during the last raid nine aerial torpedoes fell around the camp, and exploded, and one fell right in the middle and did not explode, or there would

er about to show off his girls