The Sword of Deborah

anced over the trampled earth at the V.A.D. Motor Convoy Camp, filling the hollows with wrinkled water and making the great ambulances shine darkly. It was not a pleasant evening

ere were hospitals, long rows of hospitals, each a little town in itself. I was reminded of nothing so much as the great temporary townships in the Canal Zone at Panama. There is just the same look of permanence combined with the feeling of it all being but tempora

t one hundred and thirty members in the camp and about eighty of the big Buick ambulances. Unlike the Fanny convoy I had seen, there are at E-- always day a

out on a convoy at one o'clock. It belonged to a V.A.D. at the moment home on leave, but she had left a nice selection of bed-books behind her, for

I went into her room, which was a trifle larger than the ordinary run, and could be called a sitting-room at one end, for coffee and cigarettes. There was a concert on, and I was asked whether I would like to go to it, and, at the risk of seeming ungracious, I said if they didn't mind I woul

ommunal life which took all you had and left you-what? What corner of the soul is any refuge when solitude cann

m not talking now, remember, of Waacs, girls mostly of the working class, or of those used to the sedentary occupation of clerkships, to whom this life is the biggest freedom, the greatest adventure, they have known. I am talking about girls of a class who, in t

first stages of civilisation, is, to the perfected product of civilisation, anathema. Individuals had to combine to make the world, but now that it is made, all the instincts of the most highly developed in it are towards complete liberty as regards the amount of

ately forgone, a every man in the Army has to forgo it also. Were they awar

of books, saw the great bare mess-rooms, the sitting-room, bright with cushions, cosy with screens and long chairs, saw the admirable bath-rooms, with big enamelled baths and an unlimited supply of hot

life never weighed on their souls? And, if

ven knew, rather that I must be, personally, such a weak-kneed, backboneless creature to feel I couldn't, for any cause on earth, have stood it. And I wanted-how I wan

d me, that fair girl, because she was one of those people who feel round for the right word until they have found it, however long it takes; impervious to cries of "Go on, get it off your chest,"

bled. Yet they all showed plainly that it was not a blind enjoyment-or, indeed, much enjoyment at all-

entences, those little alleys of argument that led to understanding, but led elliptically, as is the way of either sex when it is unencumbered by the necessity of dotting its i's for the comprehension of th

And it was the terrible feeling that everyone was so "bright" which had oppressed me more than anything else. The joy of finding that it wasn't so, that what I had feared I should be forced to take as the unreflecting school-girl h

per cent. really are having the "time of their lives," but the rest of them have moments when it hardly seems possible to stick it. Yet they stick it, and stick it in

IN THE

PREPARING

ENT PROTECTE

of them as being so jolly, so gay! For this again is typical-there are perhaps five girls out of every hundred who enjoy being amused, to whom it is all part

little short of a nightmare, but to all there come moments when it is exceedingly madde

ree to that. C., who did agree, pointed out that it was on the same principle as never wanting to go back to a place, no matter how beautiful it was, if you had been very unhappy there. Even after your unhappiness was dead and b

o afraid of what you might be missing all the time somewhere else. She argued that the difficulty with her had always been to ma

ars in the heart of China more than to do any one thing," I pointed out, "but I sha'n't do it because when I came out I shouldn't be young any more. Therefore the ten years in China will have to go to a man, because it doesn't matter so much to a man." This life in the B

things, if not the chief thing, that marks service in France off from equally

that the hardship is there, not physical, but mental, and to me it was the most exquisite discovery I could have made in the whole of Franc