r the least little nut or cog of a _chassis_ to his name, and
impose himself upon a Government as the Commandant of a Motor Field
Ambulance.

Still, though I am not going back to England as a protest, I _am_ going
to leave the Hospital Hotel for a little while. That bright idea has
come to me just now while we are waiting for the Commandant to tear
himself from the War Correspondents and come away. I shall get a room
here in the Hotel de la Poste for a week, and, while we wait for
Waterloo, I shall write some articles. The War Correspondents will tell
me what is being done, and what has been overdone and what remains to
do. I shall at least hear things if I can't see them. And I shall cut
the obsession of responsibility. It'll be worse than ever if there
really is going to be a second Waterloo.

Waterloo with Ursula Dearmer and Janet in the thick of it, and Mrs.
Torrence driving the Colonel's scouting-car!

There are moments of bitterness and distortion when I see the Commandant
as a curious psychic monster bringing up his women with him to the
siege-guns because of some uncanny satisfaction he finds in their
presence there. There are moods, only less perverted, when I see him
pursuing his course because it is his course, through sheer Highland
Celtic obstinacy; lucid flashes when he appears, blinded by the glamour
of his dream, and innocently regardless of actuality. Is it uncanniness?
Is it obstinacy? Is it dreamy innocence? Or is it some gorgeous streak
of Feminism? Is it the New Chivalry, that refuses to keep women back,
even from the firing-line? The New Romance, that gives them their share
of divine danger? Or, since nothing can be more absurd than to suppose
that any person acts at all times and in all circumstances on one
ground, or necessarily on any grounds, is it a little bit of all these
things? I am not sure that Feminism, or at any rate the New Chivalry,
doesn't presuppose them all.

The New Chivalry sees the point of its reporter's retirement to the
Hotel de la Poste, since it has decided that journalism is my work, and
journalism cannot flourish at the "Flandria." So we interview the nice
fat _proprietaire_, and the _proprietaire's_ nice fat wife, and between
them they find a room for me, a back room on the fourth floor, the only
one vacant in the hotel; it looks out on the white-tiled walls and the
windows of the enclosing wings. The space shut in is deep and narrow as
a well. The view from that roo