try refused to let her pass by.

One of the officers went out and returned in a few moments with a
small lady much wrapped in veils and extremely wet. She stood blinking
in the doorway in the accustomed light. She was recognised at once as
a well-known English novelist who is conducting a soup kitchen at a
railroad station three miles behind the Belgian front.

"A car was to have picked me up," she said, "but I have walked and
walked and it has not come. And I am so cold. Is that tea? And may I
come to the fire?"

So they settled her comfortably, with her feet thrust out to the
blaze, and gave her hot tea and plenty of bread and butter.

"It is like the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland," said
one of the officers gaily. "When any fresh person drops in we just
move up one place."

The novelist sipped her tea and told me about her soup kitchen.

"It is so very hard to get things to put into the soup," she said. "Of
course I have no car, and now with the new law that no women are to be
allowed in military cars I hardly know what to do."

"Will you tell me just what you do?" I asked. So she told me, and
later I saw her soup kitchen.

"Men come in from the front," she explained, "injured and without
food. Often they have had nothing to eat for a long time. We make soup
of whatever meat we can find and any vegetables, and as the hospital
trains come in we carry it out to the men. They are so very grateful
for it."

That was to be an exceptional afternoon at the naval air-station. For
hardly had the novelist been settled with her tea when two very
attractive but strangely attired young women came into the room. They
nodded to the officers, whom they knew, and went at once to the
business which had brought them.

"Can you lend us a car?" they asked. "Ours has gone off the road into
the mud, and it looks as though it would never move again."

That was the beginning of a very strange evening, almost an
extraordinary evening. For while the novelist was on her way back to
peace these young women were on their way home.

And home to them was one room of a shattered house directly on the
firing line.

Much has been said about women at the front. As far as I know at that
time there were only two women absolutely at the front. Nurses as a
rule are kept miles behind the line. Here and there a soup kitchen,
like that just spoken of, has held its courageous place three or four
miles back along the lines of com