Mr. L. looks at you as much as to say that is what he has had up his sleeve all the time. The word comes from him as casually as if he spoke of the London and South-Western terminus. But he is alive to the power of its evocation, to the unsurpassable thrill. So are you. It starts the current in that wireless system of vibrations that travel unperishing, undiminished, from the dead to the living. There are not many kilometres between Ghent and Waterloo; you are not only within the radius of the psychic shock, you are close to the central batteries, and ninety-nine years are no more than one pulse of their vibration. Through I don't know how many kilometres and ninety-nine years it has tracked you down and found you in your one moment of response.
It has a sudden steadying effect. Your brain clears. The things that loomed so large, the "Flandria," and the English Field Ambulance and its miseries, and the terrifying recklessness of its Commandant, are reduced suddenly to invisibility. You can see nothing but the second Waterloo. You forget that you have ever been a prisoner in an Hotel-Hospital. You understand the mystic fascination of the road under your windows, going south-east from Ghent to Brussels, somewhere towards Waterloo. You are reconciled to the incomprehensible lassitude of events. That is what we have all been waiting for—the second Waterloo. And we have only waited five days.
I am certainly not going back to England.
The French troops are being massed at Courtrai.
Suddenly it strikes me that I have done an injustice to the Commandant. It is all very well to say that he brought me out here against my will. But did he? He said it would interest me to see the siege of Antwerp, and I said it wouldn't. I said with the most perfect sincerity that I'd die rather than go anywhere near the siege of Antwerp, or of any other place. And now the siege-guns from Namur are battering the forts of Antwerp, and down there the armies are gathering towards the second Waterloo, and the Commandant was right. I am extremely interested. I would die rather than go back to England.
Is it possible that he knew me better than I knew myself?
When I think that it is possible I feel a slight revulsion of justice towards the Commandant. After all, he brought me here. We may disagree about the present state of Alost and Termonde, considered as health-resorts for English girls, but it is pretty certain that without him we would none of us have got here. Where, indeed, should we have been and how should we have got our motor ambulances, but for his intrepid handling of Providence and of the Belgian Red Cross and the Belgian Legation? There is genius in a man who can go out without one car, or the least little nut or cog of a châssis to his name, and impose himself upon a Government as the Commandant of a Motor Field Ambulance.
Still, though I am not going back to England as a protest, I am going to leave the Hospital Hotel for a little while. That bright idea has come to me just now while we are waiting for the Commandant to tear himself from the War Correspondents and come away. I shall get a room here in the Hôtel de la Poste for a week, and, while we wait for Waterloo, I shall write some articles. The War Correspondents will tell me what is being done, and what has been overdone and what remains to do. I shall at least hear things if I can't see them. And I shall cut the obsession of responsibility. It'll be worse than ever if there really is going to be a second Waterloo.
Waterloo with Ursula Dearmer and Janet in the thick of it, and Mrs. Torrence driving the Colonel's scouting-car!
There are moments of bitterness and distortion when I see the Commandant as a curious psychic monster bringing up his women with him to the siege-guns because of some uncanny satisfaction he finds in their presence there. There are moods, only less perverted, when I see him pursuing his course because it is his course, through sheer Highland Celtic obstinacy; lucid flashes when he appears, blinded by the glamour of his dream, and innocently regardless of actuality. Is it uncanniness? Is it obstinacy? Is it dreamy innocence? Or is it some gorgeous streak of Feminism? Is it the New Chivalry, that refuses to keep women back, even from the firing-line? The New Romance, that gives them their share of divine danger? Or, since nothing can be more absurd than to suppose that any person acts at all times and in all circumstances on one ground, or necessarily on any grounds, is it a little bit of all these things? I am not sure that Feminism, or at any rate the New Chivalry, doesn't presuppose them all.