The Sword of Deborah

nly living together in a solitude, is the more trying. In the former state one may hope to attain isolation from the very superabundance of personalities all a

their best expression among the English girls in France. From the Fanny convoy to a lonely rest station was a change that set me thinking over the problem, a problem in

cher-bearers and ambulance drivers, whose hours often prevent them getting back to billets for regular meals, take in nurses who are either arriving or leaving by a night train and would otherwise have nowhere to go, and in their spare time-if you can imagine them having any-grow their own vegetables, and make bandages, pillows, and other supplies for the troops. Just two girls, voluntary unpaid workers, who are nurses, needle-women, doctors, chemists, gardeners and general s

u don't see to it-that is a different affair, and that is where these two girls seemed to me to touch a point that of necessity the others I had seen did not. And now that women are doing men's work it is to be supposed they have found out the value of meals and no longer look on an egg with one's tea a

D.'s came to the door of the shanty to greet us. She was a fair creature, with windblown yellow hair and a smut which kindly accident had placed exactly

Parade, glass, white enamel, metal, shining in the shaft of sunlight which came palely in at the open doorway. To the left was the kitchen, stone-fl

library, exchanging their books from time to time amongst themselves by way of the ambulance trains, which are thus supplied with a library also-and charming pottery ranged along the shelves. The rest stations

ore sophisticated affair than that which I had left, yet when this rest station was started, at the beginning of the war, its habitation was a railway truck-f

brought in, a kitchen, a little dining-room where all the furniture is home-made-deep chairs out of barrels and the like-and behind that a big storeroom, crammed from floor to ceil

o always had to slip into her place last to eat it, and get out of it first to serve the next course. I saw only these two rest stations, each typical in its way, the

t for a day or two, thus possibly avoiding serious illness. Near to this same one is a Labour Battalion, many of the men from which are out-patients whose medical in

ssings had to be provided for all the wounded on board, but now, when the working of the British Red Cross is as near perfection as any human organisation well can be, the men have every care taken of them on the perfectly-fitted trains. Yet there is much attention given to the sick and wounded of every nation who come in on the trai

but every morning to the sick parade of these rest stations come not only the local V.A.D.'s and ambulance drivers, but the French civilian population as well, and in greater and greater numbers. Accidents are brought to a rest station very often in preference t