"You haven't—"
"Yes, I have. She's had her new coat on for the last three weeks. You couldn't take her out as she was, all black and white. She'd have been knocked to bits before we'd begun our job. So I had her painted. She's a good enough target for shell-fire as she is."
"You don't mean," I said, "that you're going out?"
"What else have I been meaning ever since there was a war?"
"But—where are you going to?"
"Belgium," he said. He added that it was the only blessed place he could get to.
"And what are you going to do when you get there?"
He said he was going to scout for wounded, of course.
And as he saw me still incredulous he told me how he'd managed it. He had gone every day for three weeks to the Belgian Legation and worried the Belgian Minister into a state of nervous prostration. And when the Minister was at his worst and was obliged to leave things a bit to his secretaries, he'd gone to the secretaries and worried them till the First Secretary had given him his passport and a letter of introduction to the President of the Belgian Red Cross Society at Ghent. And he had gone to Ghent—went there last week—and he had seen the President and talked to him. He had talked for ten minutes before his services had been accepted by the Belgian Red Cross.
And he was going out to-morrow.