But with Ursula Dearmer it is different. Before the Committee she appeared as a very young girl, docile, diffident, only half-awake, and of dubious efficiency. I remember my solemn pledges to her mother that Ursula Dearmer should not be allowed to go into danger, and how, if danger insisted on coming to her, she should be violently packed up and sent home. I remember thinking what a nuisance Ursula Dearmer will be, and how, when things are just beginning to get interesting, I shall be told off to see her home. And Ursula Dearmer, the youngest but one, has gone, not at all docilely and diffidently, into the greatest possible danger, and come out of it. And here she is, wide awake and in full command of the Ostend-Dunkirk expedition. And instead of my seeing her off and all the way home, she is very thoroughly and competently seeing _me_ off. At least this was her beautiful intention. But getting out of France in war-time is not a simple matter. When we tried to follow the flight of our luggage through the station door we were stopped by a sentry with a rifle. We produced our passports. They were not enough. At the sight of us brought to halt there, all the refugees began to agitate their slips of paper. And on the slips we read the words "_Laissez-passer_." My British Red Cross lady had no "_laissez-passer_." I had only my sixteenth part in the "_laissez-passer_" of the Corps, and that, hidden away in the Commandant's breast-pocket, was a part either of the luncheon-party or of the interview with the Belgian Minister of War. We couldn't get military passes, for military passes take time; and the train was due in about fifteen minutes. And the fatherly porter had vanished, taking with him the secret of our luggage. It was a fatherly old French gentleman who advised us to go to the British _Consulat_. And it was a fatherly old French _cocher_ who drove us there, or rather who drove us through interminable twisted streets and into blind alleys and out of them till we got there. As for our luggage, we renounced it and Mr. Foster's and Dr. Hanson's luggage in the interests of our own safety. At last we got to the British _Consulat_. Only I think the _cocher_ took us to the Town Hall and the Hospital and the British Embassy and the Admiralty offices first. At intervals during this transit the British Red Cross lady explained again that she was doing the right thing in leaving Ostend. It wasn't as if she was leaving her post, she was going on a hospital ship. She was sure she had done the right thing. It was not for me to be unsympathetic to an obsession produced by a retreat, so I assured her again and again that if there ever was a right thing she had done it. My heart bled for this poor lady, abandoned by the organization that had brought her out.