The Sword of Deborah

me, with its great steel fins and long rounded nose, of a dead shark. The Commandant showed it us with pride, and every successive Fanny entering was gre

od on its murderous nose with its wicked fins, the solid steel of one of them bent an

girls have managed to get not only as individual but as feminine touches as possible. I never saw a woman's office anywhere in France that was not a mass of flowers; and window-boxes, flower-beds, basins of bulbs, are cultivated everywhere. Every off

. They offered themselves to the English authorities, were refused, and came out to the war-zone and worked for the Belgians for fourteen months. They ran a hospital in Calais staffed by themselves for nurses and with Belgian doctors and orderlies. Then, in the beginning of 1916 they offered to drive motor ambulances and thus release Red Cross men drivers, and now they are running, with the exception of two ambulances for

here for a fortnight the girls never took off their clothes, but just kept on with fragmentary rests. The other occasion when there is night work is when there is a raid. As I have said, the camp is in a peculiarly unhealthy spot for bombs, and

out the names of the girls whose turn it was to drive the ambulances. She told it me as exemplifying the spirit of the girls, that never once, through all the noise and danger, did a girl falter, always answered to her name and came coolly and unconcernedly up the steps and went across to

tinuous service of the Fannies s

fortable as the camp has been made-all the necessities of life are provided by the War Office and the "frills" by the Red Cross-and in spite of the tiny separate cubicles-greatest blessing of all-decorated to taste by the owner, in spi

een a single case of strain from working the heavy ambulances. The girls do all cleaning and oiling of the cars themselves, and all repairs with the exception

f domestic staffs in France I shall say more later. Their food is Army rations, which are excellent, as I can testify after straiten

r of her cubicle. The Fannies "break out," so to speak, all over the place; even the bath-room is not sacred to them. It is a pathetic sight, that bath-room of the Fannies, more pathetic, I thought it, after I had seen the rows of big baths in other camps. The Fannies have a limited and capricious water supply, and their bath is so small as to remove forcibly

ing myself to voice anything I was wondering to these splendid strangers; later, though I never was with any one convoy more than a night, still I got the feeling that seeing so many of them

I took an impression of a certain quality that I can only describe as "stark" in the girls, though that is too bleak a word for what I mean. It is a sort of splendid austerity, that pervades their look and their outlook, that spiritually works itself out in this determined sticking at the job, this avoidance of any emotion that interferes with it, and in their bodies expresses itself in a disregard for appearances that one would never have

to accentuate anything of that kind once it was discovered ... and for the rest-I really think they are too intent on what they are doing and car