to become a Special
Correspondent; not to career under massive headlines in the columns of
the _Daily Mail_; not to steal a march on other War Correspondents and
secure the one glorious "scoop" of the campaign. Not any of these sickly
and insignificant things. But--in defiance of Tom, the chauffeur--to go
out with the Field Ambulance as an _ambulanciere_, and hunt for wounded
men, and in the intervals of hunting to observe the orbit of a shell and
the manner of shrapnel in descending. To be left behind, every day, in
an empty mess-room, with a bad pen, utterly deprived of copy or of any
substitute for copy, and to have to construct war articles out of your
inner consciousness, would be purgatory for a journalist. But to have a
mad dream in your soul and a pair of breeches in your hold-all, and to
see no possibility of "sporting" either, is the very refinement of hell.
And your tortures will be unbearable if, at the same time, you have to
hold your tongue about them and pretend that you are a genuine reporter
and that all you want is copy and your utmost aim the business of the
"scoop."

After a week of it you will not be likely to look with crystal clarity
on other people's lapses from precaution.

But it would be absurd to tell him this. Ten to one he wouldn't believe
it. He thinks I am funking all the time.

* * * * *

I am still very angry with him. He must know that I am very angry. I
think that somewhere inside him he is rather angry too.

* * * * *

All the same he has come to me and asked me to give him my soap. He says
Max has taken his.

I give him my soap, but--

These oppressions and obsessions, the deadly anxiety, the futile
responsibility and the boredom are too much for me. I am thinking
seriously of going home.

* * * * *

In the evening we--the Commandant and Janet McNeil and I--went down to
the Hotel de la Poste, to see the War Correspondents and hear the War
news. Mr. G. L. and Mr. M. and Mr. P. were there. And there among them,
to my astonishment, I found Mr. Davidson, the American sculptor.

The last time I saw Mr. Davidson it was in Mr. Joseph Simpson's studio,
the one under mine in Edwardes Square. He was making a bust of
Rabindranath Tagore; and as the great mystic poet disconcerted him by
continually lapsing into meditation under this process, thereby emptying
his beautiful face of all expr