ng
Haynes hasn't got any wings, only legs to walk into the line of fire
on). He explains very carefully that he took her under his wing
_because_ she is a young girl and he feels responsible for her to her
mother.

(Which, oddly enough, is just how _I_ feel!)

As for young Haynes, I suppose he would plead that when he and Ursula
Dearmer walked down the middle of the road there was no firing.

That seems to have been young Haynes's particular good fortune. I have
now a perfect obsession of responsibility. I see, in one dreadful vision
after another, the things that must happen to Ursula Dearmer under the
Commandant's wing, and to young Haynes and the Commandant under Ursula
Dearmer's.

No wounded were found, this time, at Termonde.

This little _contretemps_ with the Commandant has made me forget to
record a far more notable event. Mrs. Torrence brought young Lieutenant
G---- in to luncheon. He is the hero of the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps.
He is said to have accounted for nine Germans with his own rifle in one
morning. The Corps has already intimated that this is the first
well-defined specimen of a man it has yet seen in Belgium. His
dark-green uniform fits him exceedingly well. He is tall and handsome.
Drenched in the glamour of the greatest possible danger, he gives it off
like a subtle essence. As he was led in he had rather the air, the
slightly awkward, puzzled and embarrassed air, of being on show as a
fine specimen of a man. But it very soon wore off. In the absence of the
Commandant he sat in the Commandant's place, so magnificent a figure
that our mess, with gaps at every table, looked like a banquet given in
his honour, a banquet whose guests had been decimated by some
catastrophe.

Suddenly--whether it was the presence of the Lieutenant or the absence
of the Commandant, or merely reaction from the strain of inactivity, I
don't know, but suddenly madness came upon our mess. The mess-room was
no longer a mess-room in a Military Hospital, but a British school-room.
Mrs. Torrence had changed her woollen cap for a grey felt wide-awake.
She was no longer an Arctic explorer, but the wild-western cowboy of
British melodrama. She was the first to go mad. One moment she was
seated decorously at the Lieutenant's right hand; the next she was
strolling round the tables with an air of innocent abstraction, having
armed herself in secret with the little hard round rolls supplied by
order of the Commandant. Each li