ressive.

Finally we left the British lines and set out towards Melle by a
cross-road.

We got through all right. A thousand accidents may delay his going, but
once off, no barriers exist for the Commandant. Seated in the front of
the car, utterly unperturbed by the chauffeur Tom's sarcastic comments
on men, things and women, wrapped (apparently) in a beautiful dream, he
looks straight ahead with eyes whose vagueness veils a deadly simplicity
of purpose. I marvel at the transfiguration of the Commandant. Before
the War he was a fairly complex personality. Now he has ceased to exist
as a separate individual. He is merged, vaguely and vastly, in his
adventure. He is the Motor Ambulance Field Corps; he is the ambulance
car; he is the electric spark and the continuous explosion that drives
the thing along. It is useless to talk to him about anything that
happened before the War or about anything that exists outside it. He
would not admit that anything did exist outside it. He is capable of
forgetting the day of the week and the precise number of female units in
his company and the amount standing to his credit at his banker's, but,
once off, he is cock-sure of the shortest cut to the firing-line within
a radius of fifty kilometres.

Some of us who have never seen a human phenomenon of this sort are ready
to deny him an identity. They complain of his inveterate and deplorable
lack of any sense of detail. This is absurd. You might as well insist on
a faithful representation of the household furniture of the burgomaster
of Zoetenaeg, which is the smallest village in Belgium, in drawing the
map of Europe to scale. At the critical moment this more than
continental vastness gathers to a wedge-like determination that goes
home. He means to get through.

We ran into Melle about an hour before sunset.

There had been a great slaughter of Germans on the field outside the
village where the Germans were still firing when the Corps left it. We
found two of our cars drawn up by the side of the village street, close
under the houses. The Chaplain, Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert were
waiting in one of them, the new Daimler, with the chauffeur Newlands.
Dr. Wilson was in Bert's car with three wounded Germans. He was sitting
in front with one of them beside him. They say that the enemy's wounded
sometimes fire on our surgeons and Red Cross men, and Dr. Wilson had a
revolver about him when he went on the battle-field yesterday. He said