True that The Daily Chronicle promised to take any articles that I might send them from the front, but I haven't written any. You cannot write articles for The Daily Chronicle out of nothing; at least I can't.
The Commandant finally yields to argument and entreaty.
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I do not tell him that what I really want to do is to go out with the Field Ambulance, and get beyond the turn of that road.
I know I haven't the ghost of a chance; I know that if I had—as things stand at present—not being a surgeon or a trained nurse, I wouldn't take it, even to get there. And at the same time I know, with a superior certainty, that this unlikely thing will happen. This sense of certainty is not at all uncommon, but it is, or seems, unintelligible. You can only conceive it as a premonition of some unavoidable event. It is as if something had been looking for you, waiting for you, from all eternity out here; something that you have been looking for; and, when you are getting near, it begins calling to you; it draws your heart out to it all day long. You can give no account of it. All that you know about it is that it is unique. It has nothing to do with your ordinary curiosities and interests and loves; nothing to do with the thirst for experience, or for adventure, or for glory, or for the thrill. You can't "get" anything out of it. It is something hidden and secret and supremely urgent. Its urgency, indeed, is so great that if you miss it you will have missed reality itself.
For me this uncanny anticipation is somehow connected with the turn of the south-east road. I do not see how I am ever going to get there or anywhere near there. But I am not uneasy or impatient any more. There is no hurry. The thing, whatever it is, will be irresistible, and if I don't go out to find it, it will find me.
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Mrs. Torrence has gone, Heaven knows where. She has not been with the others at the Palais des Fêtes. Janet McNeil and Mrs. Lambert have been working there for five hours, serving meals to the refugees. Ursula Dearmer with extreme docility has been working all the afternoon with the nurses.
It looks as if we were beginning to settle down.