xibly, without agitation, cutting the small,
crisp waves with a sound like the flowing of stiff silk. For a moment,
after the excited rushing and hooting of the ambulance car, there had
been something not quite real about this motion, till suddenly you caught
the rhythm, the immense throb and tremor of the engines.

Then she knew.

She was going out, with John and Gwinnie Denning and a man called Sutton,
Dr. Sutton, to Belgium, to the War. She wondered whether any of them
really knew what it would be like when they got there.--She was vague,
herself. She thought of the war mostly in two pictures: one very distant,
hanging in the air to her right, colourless as an illustration in the
papers, grey figures tumbled in a grey field, white puff-bursts of
shrapnel in a grey sky: and one very near; long lines of stretchers,
wounded men and dead men on stretchers, passing and passing before her.
She saw herself and John carrying a stretcher, John at the head and her
at the foot and Gwinnie and Dr. Sutton with another stretcher.

Nothing for her and John and Gwinnie but field work; the farm had spoiled
them incurably for life indoors. But it had hardened their muscles and
their nerves, it had fitted them for the things they would have to do.
The things they would have to see. There would be blood; she knew there
would be blood; but she didn't see it; she saw white, very white
bandages, and greyish white, sallow-white faces that had no features that
she knew. She hadn't really thought so very much about the war; there had
been too many other things to think about. Their seven weeks' training at
Coventry, the long days in Roden and Conway's motor works, the long
evenings in the ambulance classes; field practice in the meadow that
John's father had lent to the Red Cross; runs along the Warwickshire
roads with John sitting beside her, teaching her to steer and handle the
heavy ambulance car. An endless preparation.

And under it all, like a passion, like a hidden illness, their
impatience, their intolerable longing to be out there.

If there had been nothing else to think about there was John. Always
John. Not that you could think about him without thinking about the war;
he was so thoroughly mixed up with it; you couldn't conceive him as left
out of it or as leaving himself out. It had been an obsession with him,
to get into it, to get into it at once, without waiting. That was why
there was only four of them. He wouldn't wait f