Down in the vestibule I encounter Mrs. Torrence in khaki. Mrs. Torrence yearning for her wounded. Mrs. Torrence determined to get to her wounded at any cost. She is not abased or dejected, but exalted, rather. She is ready to go to the President or to the Military Power itself, and demand her wounded from them. Her beautiful eyes demand them from Heaven itself.
I cannot say there are not enough wounded to go round, but I point out for the fifteenth time that the trouble is there are not enough ambulance cars to go round.
But it is no use. It does not explain why Heaven should have chosen Ursula Dearmer and caused shells to bound in her direction, and have rejected Mrs. Torrence. The Military Power that should have ordered these things has abandoned us to the caprice of Heaven.
Of course if Mrs. Torrence was a saint she would fold her hands and bow her superb little head before the decrees of Heaven; but she is only a mortal woman, born with the genius of succour and trained to the last point of efficiency; so she rages. The tigress, robbed of her young, is not more furiously inconsolable than Mrs. Torrence.
It is not Ursula Dearmer's fault. She is innocent of supplanting Mrs. Torrence. The thing simply happened. More docile than determined, unhurrying and uneager, and only half-awake, she seems to have rolled into Car No. 1 with Heaven's impetus behind her. Like the shell at Alost, it is her luck.
And on the rest of us our futility and frustration weigh like lead. The good Belgian food has become bitter in our mouths. When we took our miserable walk through Ghent this morning we felt that l'Ambulance Anglaise must be a mark for public hatred and derision because of us. I declare I hardly dare go into the shops with the Red Cross brassard on my arm. I imagine sardonic raillery in the eyes of every Belgian that I meet. We do not think the authorities will stand it much longer; they will fire us out of the Hôpital Militaire No. II.
But no, the authorities do not fire us out. Impassive in wisdom and foreknowledge, they smile benignly on our agitation. They compliment the English Ambulance on the work it has done already. They convey the impression that but for the English Ambulance the Belgian Army would be in a bad way. Mademoiselle F. insists that the Hospital will soon be overflowing with the wounded from Antwerp and that she can find work even for me. It is untrue that there are three hundred nurses in the Hospital. There are only three hundred nurses in all Belgium. They pile it on so that we are more depressed than ever.
Janet McNeil is convinced that they think we are no good and that they are just being angels to us because they are sorry for us.
I break it to them very gently that I've volunteered to serve at the tables at the Palais des Fêtes. I feel as if I had sneaked into a remunerative job while my comrades are starving.
The Commandant is not quite as pleased as I thought he would be to hear of my engagement at the Palais des Fêtes. He says, "It is not your work." I insist that my work is to do anything I can do; and that if I cannot dress wounds I can at least hand round bread and pour out coffee and wash up dishes. It is true that I am Secretary and Reporter and (for the time being) Treasurer to the Ambulance, and that I carry its funds in a leather purse belt round my body. Because I am the smallest and weakest member of the Corps that is the most unlikely place for the funds to be. It was imprudent, to say the least of it, for the Chaplain in his khaki, to carry them, as he did, into the firing-line. The belt, which fitted the Chaplain, hangs about half a yard below my waist and is extremely uncomfortable, but that is neither here nor there. Keeping the Corps' accounts only takes two hours and a half, even with Belgian and English money mixed, and when I've added the same column of figures ten times up and ten times down, to make certain it's all right (I am no good at accounts, but I know my weakness and guard against it, giving the Corps the benefit of every doubt and making good every deficit out of my private purse). Writing the Day-Book—perhaps half an hour. The Commandant's correspondence, when he has any, and reporting to the British Red Cross Society, when there is anything to report, another half-hour at the outside; and there you have only three and a half hours employed out of the twenty-four, even if I balanced my accounts every day, and I don't.