the Front)
which were to bring in money for the Corps. To have nothing to do but
hang about the Hospital on the off-chance of the Commandant coming back
unexpectedly and wanting a letter written; to pass the man with the
bullet wound in his mouth a dozen times a day (he is getting very slowly
better; his poor face was a little more human this morning); to see the
maimed and crippled men trailing and hobbling about the hall, and the
wounded carried in on their stretchers--dripping stretchers, agonized
bodies, limbs rolled in bandages, blood oozing through the bandages,
heads bound with bandages, bandages glued tight to the bone with
blood--to see all this and be utterly powerless to help; to endure, day
after day, the blank, blond horror of the empty mess-room; to sit before
a marble-topped table with a bad pen, never enough paper and hardly any
ink, and nothing at all to write about, while all the time the names of
places, places you have not seen and never will see--Termonde, Alost,
Quatrecht and Courtrai--go on sounding in your brain with a maddening,
luring reiteration; to sit in a hateful inactivity, and a disgusting, an
intolerable safety, and to be haunted by a vision of two figures,
intensely clear on a somewhat vague background--Mrs. Torrence following
her star of the greatest possible danger, and Ursula Dearmer wandering
in youth and innocence among the shells; to be obliged to think of
Ursula Dearmer's mother when you would much rather not think of her; to
be profoundly and irrevocably angry with the guileless Commandant, whom
at the moment you regard (it may be perversely) as the prime agent in
this fatuous sacrifice of women's lives; to want to stop it and to be
unable to stop it, and at the same time to feel a brute because you want
to stop it--when _they_ are enjoying the adventure--I can only say of
the experience that I hope there is no depth of futility deeper than
this to come. You might as well be taken prisoner by the
Germans--better, since that would, at least, give you something to write
about afterwards.

What's more, I'm bored.

When I told the Commandant all this he looked very straight at me and
said, "Then you'd better come with us to Termonde." So straight he
looked that the suggestion struck me less as a _bona fide_ offer than an
ironic reference to my five weeks' funk.

I don't tell him that that is precisely what I want to do. That his
wretched Reporter nourishes an insane ambition--not