Saw Mr. Foster. He is to be sent back to England for an operation. Dr. Wilson is to take him. He asked me if I thought the Commandant would take him back again when he is better.
Saw the President about Mr. Foster. He will not hear of his going back to England. He wants him to stay in the Hospital and be operated on here. He promises the utmost care and attention. He is most distressed to think that he should go.
It doesn't occur to him in his kindness that it would be much more distressing if the Germans came into Ghent and interrupted the operation.
Cabled Miss F. about her Glasgow ambulance, asking her to pay her staff if her funds ran to it. Cabled British Red Cross to send Mr. Gould and his scouting-car here instead of to France. Cabled Mr. Gould to get the British Red Cross to send him here.
Mr. Lambert has been ill with malaria. He has gone back to England to get well again and to repair the car that broke down at Lokeren.[22]
Somebody else is to look after Mr. —— this afternoon.
I have been given leave rather reluctantly to sit up with him at night.
The Commandant is going to take me in Tom's Daimler (Car 1) to the British lines to look for a base for that temporary hospital which is still running in his head like a splendid dream. I do not see how, with the Germans at Melle, only four and a half miles off, any sort of hospital is to be established on this side of Ghent.
Tom, the chauffeur, does not look with favour on the expedition. I have had to point out to him that a Field Ambulance is not, as he would say, the House of Commons, and that there is a certain propriety binding even on a chauffeur and a limit to the freedom of the speech you may apply to your Commandant. This afternoon Tom has exceeded all the limits. The worst of Tom is that while his tongue rages on the confines of revolt, he himself is punctilious to excess on the point of orders. Either he has orders or he hasn't them. If he has them he obeys them with a punctuality that puts everybody else in the wrong. If he hasn't them, an earthquake wouldn't make him move. Such is his devotion to orders that he will insist on any one order holding good for an unlimited time after it has been given.
So now, in defence of his manners, he urges that what with orders and counter-orders, the provocation is more than flesh and blood can stand. Tom himself is protest clothed in flesh and blood.