e balance and save his
wounded man. He is very much distressed at having to lie up and be
waited on.

* * * * *

Impossible to write a Journal or any articles while I am in the
Hospital, and there is no table yet in my room at the Hotel Cecil.

The first ambulance car, with the chauffeur Bert and Mr. Riley, has come
back from Melle, where they left Mrs. Torrence and Janet and Dr. Wilson.
They went back again in the afternoon.

They are all out now except poor Mr. Foster and Mrs. Lambert, who is
somewhere with her husband.

I am the only available member of the Corps left in the Hospital!

[_3.30._]

No Germans have appeared yet.

* * * * *

I was sitting up in the mess-room, making entries in the Day-Book, when
I was sent for. Somebody or something had arrived, and was waiting
below.

On the steps of the Hospital I found two brand-new British chauffeurs in
brand-new suits of khaki. Behind them, drawn up in the entry, were two
brand-new Daimler motor-ambulance cars.

I thought it was a Field Ambulance that had lost itself on the way to
France. The chauffeurs (they had beautiful manners, and were very spick
and span, and one pleased me by his remarkable resemblance to the
editor of the _English Review_)--the chauffeurs wanted to know whether
they had come to the right place. And of course they hardly had, if all
the British Red Cross ambulance cars were going into France.

Then they explained.

They were certainly making for Ghent. The British Red Cross Society had
sent them there. They were only anxious to know whether they had come to
the right Hospital, the Hospital where the English Field Ambulance was
quartered.

Yes: that was right. They had been sent for us.

They had just come up from Ostend, and they had not been ten minutes in
Ghent before orders came through for an ambulance to be sent at once to
Melle.

The only available member of the Corps was its Secretary and Reporter.
To that utterly untrained and supremely inappropriate person Heaven sent
this incredible luck.

When I think how easily I might have missed it! If I'd gone for a stroll
in the town. If I'd sat five minutes longer with Mr. Foster. If the
landlord of the Hotel Cecil had kept his word and given me a table, when
I should, to a dead certainty, have been writing this wretched Journal
at the ineffable moment when the chauffeurs arrived.

I am glad to think that