But it is on the Chaplain, Mr. Grierson, that the strain is telling most. It shows in his pale and prominent blue eyes, and in a slight whiteness about his high cheek-bones. In his valiant khaki he has more than any of us the air of being on the eve. He is visibly bracing himself to a stupendous effort. He smokes a cigarette with ostentatious nonchalance. We all think we know these symptoms. We turn our eyes away, considerately, from Mr. Grierson. Which of us can say that when our turn comes the thought of danger will not spoil our breakfast?
The poor boy squares his shoulders. He is white now round the edges of his lips. But he is going through with it.
Suddenly he speaks.
"I shall hold Matins in this room at ten o'clock every Sunday morning. If any of you like to attend you may."
There is a terrible silence. None of us look at each other. None of us look at Mr. Grierson.
Presently Mrs. Torrence is heard protesting that we haven't come here for Matins; that this is a mess-room and not a private chapel; and that Matins are against all military discipline.
"I shall hold Matins all the same," says Mr. Grierson. His voice is thick and jerky. "And if anybody likes to attend, they can. That's all I've got to say."
He gets up. He faces the batteries of unholy and unsympathetic eyes. He throws away the end of his cigarette with a gesture of superb defiance.
He has gone through with it. He has faced the fire. He has come out, not quite victorious, but with his hero's honour unstained.
It seemed to me awful that none of us should want his Matins. I should like, personally, to see him through with them. I could face the hostile eyes. But what I cannot face is the ceremony itself. My moral was spoiled with too many ceremonies in my youth; ceremonies that lacked all beauty and sincerity and dignity. And though I am convinced of the beauty and sincerity and dignity of Mr. Grierson's soul I cannot kneel down with him and take part in the performance of his prayer. Prayer is either the Supreme Illusion, or the Supreme Act, the pure and naked surrender to Reality, and attended by such sacredness and shyness that you can accomplish it only when alone or lost in a multitude that prays.
But why is there no Victoria Cross for moral courage?
(Dr. Wilson has come. He looks clever and nice.)
Our restlessness increases.
[11 a.m.]
I have seen one of them. As I went downstairs this morning, two men carrying a stretcher crossed the landing below. I saw the outline of the wounded body under the blanket, and the head laid back on the pillow.
It is impossible, it is inconceivable, that I should have been afraid of seeing this. It is as if the wounded man himself absolved me from the memory and the reproach of fear.
I stood by the stair-rail to let them pass. There was some difficulty about turning at the stair-head. Mr. Riley was there. He came forward and took one end of the stretcher and turned it. He was very quiet and very gentle. You could see that he did the right thing by instinct. And I saw his face, and knew what had brought him here.
And here on the first landing is another wounded. His face is deformed by an abscess from a bullet in his mouth. It gives him a terrible look, half savage, wholly suffering. He sits there and cannot speak.
Mr. Riley is the only one of us who has found anything to do. So presently we go out to get our military passes. We stroll miserably about the town, oppressed with a sense of our futility. We buy cigarettes for the convalescents.
And at noon no orders have come for us.
They come just as we are sitting down to lunch. Our ambulance car is to go to Alost at once. The Commandant is arrested in the act of cutting bread. Dr. Bird is arrested in the act of eating it. We are all arrested in our several acts. As if they had been criminal acts, we desist suddenly. The men get up and look at each other. It is clear that they cannot all go. Mr. Grierson looks at the Commandant. His face is a little white and strained, as it was this morning when he announced Matins for ten o'clock.
The Commandant looks at Dr. Bird and tells him that he may go if he likes. His tone is admirably casual; it conveys no sense of the magnificence of his renunciation. He looks also at Mr. Grierson and Mr. Foster. The lot of honour falls upon these three.
They set out, still with their air of a youthful picnic party. Dr. Bird is more than ever the boisterous young man in charge of the champagne.
I am contented so long as Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert and Mrs. Torrence and Janet McNeil and the Commandant do not go yet. To anybody who knows the Commandant he is bound to be a prominent figure in the terrible moving pictures made by fear. Smitten by some great idea, he dashes out of cover as the shrapnel is falling. He wanders, wrapped in a happy dream, into the enemies' trenches. He mingles with their lines of communication as I have seen him mingle with the traffic at the junction of Chandos Street and the Strand. If you were to inform him of a patrol of Uhlans coming down the road, he would only say, "I see no Uhlans," and continue in their direction. It is inconceivable to his optimism that he should encounter Uhlans in a world so obviously made for peace and righteousness.
So that it is a relief to see somebody else (whom I do not know quite so well) going first. Time enough to be jumpy when the Commandant and the women go forth on the perilous adventure.
That is all very well. But I am jumpy all the same. By the mere fact that they are going out first Mr. Grierson and Mr. Foster have suddenly become dear and sacred. Their lives, their persons, their very clothes—Dr. Bird's cheerful face, which is so like an overgrown cherub's, his blond, gold lock of infantile hair, Mr. Grierson's pale eyes that foresee danger, his not too well fitting khaki coat—have acquired suddenly a priceless value, the value of things long seen and long admired. It is as if I had known them all my life; as if life will be unendurable if they do not come back safe.
It is not very endurable now. Of all the things that can happen to a woman on a field ambulance, the worst is to stay behind. To stay behind with nothing in the world to do but to devise a variety of dreadful deaths for Tom, the chauffeur, and Dr. Bird and Mr. Grierson and Mr. Foster. To know nothing except that Alost is being bombarded and that it is to Alost that they are going.
And the others who have been left behind are hanging about in gloom, disgusted with their fate. Mrs. Torrence and Janet McNeil are beginning to ask themselves what they are here for. To go through the wards is only to be in the way of the angelic beings with red crosses on their breasts and foreheads who are already somewhat in each other's way. Mrs. Torrence and the others do, however, go into the wards and talk to the wounded and cheer them up. I sit in the deserted mess-room, and look at the lunch that Tom and Dr. Bird and Mr. Grierson should have eaten and were obliged to leave behind. I would give anything to be able to go round the wards and cheer the wounded up. I wonder whether there is anything I could conceivably do for the wounded that would not bore them inexpressibly if I were to do it. I frame sentence after sentence in strange and abominable French, and each, apart from its own inherent absurdity, seems a mockery of the wounded. You cannot go to an immortal hero and grin at him and say Comment allez-vous? and expect him to be cheered up, especially when you know yourself to be one of a long procession of women who have done the same.
I abandon myself to my malady of self-distrust.
It is at its worst when Jean and Max, the convalescent orderlies, come in to remove the ruins of our mess. They are pathetic and adorable with their close-cropped heads in the pallor of their convalescence (Jean is attired in a suit of yellowish linen and Max in striped flannels). Jean's pallor is decorated (there is no other word for it) with blue-grey eyes, black eyebrows, black eyelashes and a little black moustache. He is martial and ardent and alert. But the pallor of Max is unredeemed; it is morbid and profound. It has invaded his whole being. His eyelids and his