ly believe that ten thousand Germans would come
in the morning and take our ambulance prisoner. That is to say, he
believed what nobody else believed.

(2.) M. ---- was scared himself. He had no desire to be taken quite so
near the firing-line as the English Ambulance seemed likely to take him;
so that the departure of the English Ambulance would not be wholly
disagreeable to M. ----. (This theory is too far-fetched.)

(3.) M. ---- was the agent of the Military Power, commissioned to test
the nerve of the English Ambulance. ("Stood fire, have they? Give 'em a
_real_ scare, and see how they behave.")

(4.) M. ---- is a psychologist and made this little experiment on the
English Ambulance himself.

(5.) He is a humorist and was simply "pulling its leg."

The three last theories are plausible, but all five collapse before the
inscrutability of Monsieur's face.

Germans or no Germans, one ambulance car started at five in the morning
for Quatrecht, somewhere between Ghent and Brussels, to fetch wounded
and refugees. The other went, later, to Zele. I am not very clear as to
who has gone with them, but Mrs. Torrence, Mrs. Lambert, Janet McNeil
and Dr. Haynes and Mr. Riley have been left behind.

It is their third day of inactivity, and three months of it could not
have devastated them more. They have touched the very bottom of suicidal
gloom. Three months hence their state of mind will no doubt appear in
all its absurdity, but at the moment it is too piteous for words. When
you think what they were yesterday and the day before, there is no
language to express the crescendo of their despair. I came upon Mr.
Riley this morning, standing by the window of the mess-room, and
contemplating the facade of the railway station. (It is making a pattern
on our brains.) I tried to soothe him. I said it was hard lines--beastly
hard lines--and told him to cheer up--there'd be heaps for him to do
presently. And he turned from me like a man who has just buried his
first-born.

Janet McNeil is even more heart-rending, sunk in a chair with her hands
stuck into the immense pockets of her overcoat, her flawless and
impassive face tilted forward as her head droops forlornly to her
breast. She is such a child that she can see nothing beyond to-day, and
yesterday and the day before that. She is going back to-morrow. Her
valour and energy are frustrated and she is wounded in her honour. She
is conscious of the rottenness of putting on a khaki