s only takes two hours and a half, even with Belgian and
English money mixed, and when I've added the same column of figures ten
times up and ten times down, to make certain it's all right (I am no
good at accounts, but I know my weakness and guard against it, giving
the Corps the benefit of every doubt and making good every deficit out
of my private purse). Writing the Day-Book--perhaps half an hour. The
Commandant's correspondence, when he has any, and reporting to the
British Red Cross Society, when there is anything to report, another
half-hour at the outside; and there you have only three and a half hours
employed out of the twenty-four, even if I balanced my accounts every
day, and I don't.

True that _The Daily Chronicle_ promised to take any articles that I
might send them from the front, but I haven't written any. You cannot
write articles for _The Daily Chronicle_ out of nothing; at least I
can't.

The Commandant finally yields to argument and entreaty.

* * * * *

I do not tell him that what I really want to do is to go out with the
Field Ambulance, and get beyond the turn of that road.

I know I haven't the ghost of a chance; I know that if I had--as things
stand at present--not being a surgeon or a trained nurse, I wouldn't
take it, even to get there. And at the same time I know, with a superior
certainty, that this unlikely thing will happen. This sense of certainty
is not at all uncommon, but it is, or seems, unintelligible. You can
only conceive it as a premonition of some unavoidable event. It is as if
something had been looking for you, waiting for you, from all eternity
out here; something that you have been looking for; and, when you are
getting near, it begins calling to you; it draws your heart out to it
all day long. You can give no account of it. All that you know about it
is that it is unique. It has nothing to do with your ordinary
curiosities and interests and loves; nothing to do with the thirst for
experience, or for adventure, or for glory, or for the thrill. You can't
"get" anything out of it. It is something hidden and secret and
supremely urgent. Its urgency, indeed, is so great that if you miss it
you will have missed reality itself.

For me this uncanny anticipation is somehow connected with the turn of
the south-east road. I do not see how I am ever going to get there or
anywhere near there. But I am not uneasy or impatient any more. There is
no h