adds that there will soon be work for all of us in the
Hospital. Yes: even for the untrained.

Life is once more bearable.

But the others won't believe it. They say there are three hundred nurses
in the hospital.

And the fact remains that we have two young surgeons cooling their heels
in the corridors, and a fully-trained nurse tearing her hair out, while
the young girl, Ursula Dearmer, takes the field.

And I think of the poor little dreamy, guileless Commandant in his
conspicuous car, and I smile at her in secret, thanking Heaven that it's
Ursula Dearmer and not Mrs. Torrence who is at his side.

The ambulance has come back from Alost with two or three wounded and
some refugees. The Commandant is visibly elated, elated out of all
proportion to the work actually done. Ursula Dearmer is not elated in
the very least, but she is wide-awake. Her docility has vanished with
her torpor. She and the Commandant both look as if something extremely
agreeable had happened to them at Alost. But they are reticent. We
gather that Ursula Dearmer has been working with the nuns in the Convent
at Alost, where the wounded were taken before the ambulance cars removed
them to Ghent. It sounded very safe.

But the Commandant dashed into my room after luncheon. His face was
radiant, almost ecstatic. He was like a child who has rushed in to tell
you how ripping the pantomime was.

"We've been _under fire_!"

But I was very angry. Coldly and quietly angry. I felt like that when I
was ten years old and piloting my mother through the thick of the
traffic between Guildhall and the Bank, and she broke from me and was
all but run over. I don't quite know what I said to him, but I think I
said he ought to be ashamed of himself. For it seems that Ursula
Dearmer was with him.

I remembered how Ursula Dearmer's mother had come to me in the
committee-room and asked me how near we proposed to go to the
firing-line, and whether her daughter would be in any danger, and how I
said, first of all, that there wasn't any use pretending that there
wouldn't be danger, and that the chances were--and how the Commandant
had intervened at that moment to assure her that danger there would be
none. With a finger on the map of France and Belgium he traced the
probable, the inevitable, course of the campaign; and in light, casual
tones which allayed all anxiety, he explained how, as the Germans
advanced upon any point, we should retire upon our base. As for t