familiar. A thin mist was drifting
across the country, getting lost in valleys where it piled up into
fleecy mounds, getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like
tattered banners. Every now and then, with the suddenness of our
approach, we would startle an aged shepherd, muffled and pensive as
an Arab, strolling slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the
sentinel goats which led his flock. The day had been strangely mystic.
Time seemed a mood. I had ceased to trouble about where I was going;
that I knew my ultimate destination was sufficient. The way that led
to it, which I had never seen before, should never see again perhaps,
and through which I travelled at the rate of an express, seemed a
fairy non-existent Hollow Land. Landscapes grew blurred with the speed
of our passage. They loomed up on us like waves, stayed with us for a
second and vanished. The staff-officer, who was my conductor, drowsed
on his seat beside the driver. He had wearied himself in the morning,
taking me now here to see an American Division putting on a manoeuvre,
now there to where the artillery were practising, then to another
valley where machine-guns tapped like thousands of busy typewriters
working on death's manuscript. After that had come bayonet charges
against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging--all the industrious
pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding actuality. We
were far away from all that now; the brown figures had melted into the
brownness of the hills. There might have been no war. Perhaps there
wasn't. Never was there a world more grey and quiet. I grew sleepy.
My head nodded. I opened my eyes, pulled myself together and again
nodded. The roar of the engine was soothing. The rush of wind lay
heavy against my eye-lids. It seemed odd that I should be here and
not in the trenches. When I was in the line I had often made up life's
deficiencies by imagining, imagining.... Perhaps I was really in
the line now. I wouldn't wake up to find out. That would come
presently--it always had.

We were slowing down. I opened my eyes lazily. No, we weren't
stopping--only going through a village. What a quaint grey village
it was--worth looking at if I wasn't so tired. I was on the point
of drowsing off again when I caught sight of a word written on a
sign-board, _Domremy_. My brain cleared. I sat up with a jerk. It was
magic that I should find myself here without warning--at Domremy, the
Bethlehem of warrior-woman