u. It starts the
current in that wireless system of vibrations that travel unperishing,
undiminished, from the dead to the living. There are not many kilometres
between Ghent and Waterloo; you are not only within the radius of the
psychic shock, you are close to the central batteries, and ninety-nine
years are no more than one pulse of their vibration. Through I don't
know how many kilometres and ninety-nine years it has tracked you down
and found you in your one moment of response.

It has a sudden steadying effect. Your brain clears. The things that
loomed so large, the "Flandria," and the English Field Ambulance and its
miseries, and the terrifying recklessness of its Commandant, are reduced
suddenly to invisibility. You can see nothing but the second Waterloo.
You forget that you have ever been a prisoner in an Hotel-Hospital. You
understand the mystic fascination of the road under your windows, going
south-east from Ghent to Brussels, somewhere towards Waterloo. You are
reconciled to the incomprehensible lassitude of events. That is what we
have all been waiting for--the second Waterloo. And we have only waited
five days.

I am certainly not going back to England.

The French troops are being massed at Courtrai.

Suddenly it strikes me that I have done an injustice to the Commandant.
It is all very well to say that he brought me out here against my will.
But did he? He said it would interest me to see the siege of Antwerp,
and I said it wouldn't. I said with the most perfect sincerity that I'd
die rather than go anywhere near the siege of Antwerp, or of any other
place. And now the siege-guns from Namur are battering the forts of
Antwerp, and down there the armies are gathering towards the second
Waterloo, and the Commandant was right. I am extremely interested. I
would die rather than go back to England.

Is it possible that he knew me better than I knew myself?

When I think that it is possible I feel a slight revulsion of justice
towards the Commandant. After all, he brought me here. We may disagree
about the present state of Alost and Termonde, considered as
health-resorts for English girls, but it is pretty certain that without
him we would none of us have got here. Where, indeed, should we have
been and how should we have got our motor ambulances, but for his
intrepid handling of Providence and of the Belgian Red Cross and the
Belgian Legation? There is genius in a man who can go out without one
car, o