ile that I had seen first on the
Petrograd platform. Then he turned and walked slowly towards the
house.

What Nikitin had said about Trenchard's expectation of "romantic war"
was perhaps true, in different degrees, of all of us. Even I, in spite
of my earlier experience, felt some irritation at this delay, and to
those of us who had arrived flaming with energy, bravery, resolution
to make their name before Europe, this feasting in a country garden
seemed a deliberate insult. Was this "romantic war?" These long meals
under the trees, deep sleeps in the afternoon when the pigeons cooed
round the little red bell-tower and the pump creaked in the cobbled
courtyard and the bees hummed in the garden? Bees, cold water shining
deep in the well, and the samovar chuckling behind the flower-beds,
and fifteen versts away the Austrians challenging the Russian
nation!... "You know," Andrey Vassilievitch said to me, "it's very
disheartening."

Marie Ivanovna at the end of the first week spoke her mind. I found
her one evening before supper leaning over the fence, gazing across
the long flat field, pale gold in the dusk with the hills like grey
clouds beyond it.

"They tell me," she said, turning to me, "that we may be another
fortnight like this."

"Yes," I said, "it's quite possible, or even longer. We can't provide
wounded and battles for you if there aren't any."

"But there are!" she cried. "Isn't the whole of Europe fighting and
isn't it simply disgusting of us to be sitting down here, eating and
sleeping, just as though we were in a _dacha_ in the country? At least
in the hospital in Petrograd I was working ... here...."

"We've got to stick to our Division," I answered. "They can't have it
in reserve very long. When it goes, we'll go. The whole secret of
leading this life out here is taking exactly what comes as completely
as you can take it. If it's a time for sleeping and eating, sleep and
eat--there'll be days enough when you'll get nothing of either."

She laughed then, swinging round to me, with the dusk round her white
nurse's cap and her eyes dark with her desires and hopes and
disappointments.

"Oh, I've no right to be discontented.... Every one is so good to me.
I love them all--even you, Mr. Durward. But I want to begin, to
begin, to begin! I want to see what it's like, to find what there is
there that frightens them, or makes them happy. We had a young officer
in our hospital who died. He was too ill ...