The war dominated her life; it drilled her, and drove her, and exacted the last fraction of her endurance and courage. It chased personal things away into the dim background of her life. When she thought of the Valley and her experiences there, it was as if she was visualizing, not her own past life, but some story which she had read and remembered with the sharp, clear memory, which never leaves us, of our childhood's days.
With Margaret, as with most people, the war opened up a completely new phase of mental as well as physical experiences. Nor could her thoughts ever be the same again. Margaret's phase resembled the state of a patient gradually recovering from a serious illness, an illness in which she has faced the true proportions of the things belonging to this life, and the triviality of human tragedies as they had existed before the war. Her life had begun all over again. The war was remaking it. After a serious illness or a shattered love-affair no woman can take up life at exactly the same standpoint as before.
Margaret found it impossible to imagine personal ambitions and personal amusements ever forming a part of her life again. Happiness brought scorn with the very mention of it. The excitement and the daily-accumulating list of horrors which shocked the unsuspecting people of England during the first few months of the war, must be vividly in the reader's thoughts while he pictures Margaret in her life as a pantry-maid, a physically-weary pantry-maid, in a vast house in London which had been converted into a hospital. She was only one of the many girls in London in the various homes and hospitals who were drudging with aching limbs and loyal hearts from morning until night.
She preferred being pantry-maid to lift-maid, which was the only other post in the house which she had been offered. Taking visitors up and down in a lift all day long seemed to her more monotonous than washing up cups and saucers which the wounded drank out of, and scrubbing boards and washing out cupboards. Margaret was only doing her humble bit, a bit which required few brains and little education; a bit which necessitated a good deal of sturdy grit and devotion. Not a soul in the house knew nor cared anything about the life which she had led before the war, and her college record was of less account than the fact that she looked practical and strong. She had been given the post on the strength of her physical perfection rather than her proficiency as a V.A.D.
During the first three months she heard fairly often from Freddy, who was cheerfully enduring what thousands of young Englishmen endured during the early days of training.
If this is a war of second-lieutenants, Freddy was an excellent specimen of the men who have won renown. His physique laughed at hardship; his practical mind adored the order and method which is essentially a part of military efficiency. His work in Egypt, far as it seems removed from modern warfare, served a good purpose when trench-digging and planning became a part of his training.
October had come and still no news had reached him of Michael, nor had Margaret had any word of her lover through the Iretons. Freddy was comforting himself with the assurance that the war had satisfactorily driven him out of Margaret's mind. She seldom mentioned his name in her letters, which were as brief and matter-of-fact as his own.
Sometimes in the busy London streets, and in crowded omnibuses, a vision of the Valley and the smiling Theban hills would rise before her eyes, but it would fade away and become as unreal as the Bible story of the world's creation.
Physical exhaustion made it possible for her to see these visions of the Valley, and the stars in the Southern heavens, with no throbbing in her veins or sense of Michael's lips pressed on her own. Physical labour leaves little expression for fine sentiment and imagination.
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