community. Probabilities that
rule all human intercourse, as we have hitherto known it, will be
temporarily suspended in our case. But we shall gain more than we lose.
Insignificant as individuals, as a corps we share the honour and
prestige of the Military Authority under which we work. We have visions
of a relentless discipline commanding and controlling us. A cold glory
hovers over the Commandant as the vehicle of this transcendent power.

When the Power has its way with us it will take no count of friendships
or affinities. It will set precedence at naught. It will say to itself,
"Here are two field ambulance cars and fourteen people. Five out of
these fourteen are women, and what the devil are they doing in a field
ambulance?" And it will appoint two surgeons, who will also serve as
stretcher-bearers, to each car; it will set our trained nurse, Mrs.
Torrence, in command of the untrained nurses in one of the wards of the
Military Hospital No. II.; the Hospital itself will find suitable
feminine tasks for Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert; while Janet McNeil
and the Secretary will be told off to work among the refugees. And until
more stretcher-bearers are wanted the rest of us will be nowhere. If
nothing can be found for our women in the Hospital they will be sent
home.

It seems inconceivable that the Power, if it is anything like Lord
Kitchener, can decide otherwise.

Odd how the War changes us. I, who abhor and resist authority, who
hardly know how I am to bring myself to obey my friend the Commandant,
am enamoured of this Power and utterly submissive. I realize with
something like a thrill that we are in a military hospital under
military orders; and that my irrelevant former self, with all that it
has desired or done, must henceforth cease (perhaps irrevocably) to
exist. I contemplate its extinction with equanimity. I remember that one
of my brothers was a Captain in the Gunners, that another of them fought
as a volunteer in the first Boer War; that my uncle, Captain Hind, of
the Bengal Fusiliers, fought in the Mutiny and in the Crimean War, and
his son at Chitral, and that I have one nephew in Kitchener's Army and
one in the West Lancashire Hussars; and that three generations of solid
sugar-planters and ship-owners cannot separate me from my forefathers,
who seem to have been fighting all the time. (At the moment I have
forgotten my five weeks' blue funk.)

Mrs. Torrence's desire for discipline is not more s