================================== || || || || || || || || Round these we group ourselves thus: the Commandant in the middle of the top table in the window, between Mrs. Torrence and Ursula Dearmer; Dr. Haynes and Dr. Bird, on the other side of Ursula Dearmer; the chauffeurs, Tom and Bert, round the corner at the right-hand side table; I am round the other corner at the left-hand side table, by Mrs. Torrence, and Janet McNeil is on my right, and on hers are Mrs. Lambert and Mr. Foster and the Chaplain. Mr. Riley sits alone on the inside opposite Mrs. Torrence. This rather quiet and very serious person interests me. He doesn't say anything, and you wonder what sort of consciousness goes on under the close-cropped, boyish, black velvet hair. Nature has left his features a bit unfinished, the further to baffle you. All these people are interesting, intensely interesting and baffling, as men and women are bound to be who have come from heaven knows where to face heaven knows what. Most of them are quite innocently unaware. They do not know that they are interesting, or baffling either. They do not know, and it has not occurred to them to wonder, how they are going to affect each other or how they are going to behave. Nobody, you would say, is going to affect the Commandant. When he is not dashing up and down, driven by his mysterious energy, he stands apart in remote and dreamy isolation. His eyes, when they are not darting brilliantly in pursuit of the person or the thing he needs, stand apart too in a blank, blue purity, undarkened by any perception of the details that may accumulate under his innocent nose. He has called this corps into being, gathered these strange men and women up with a sweep of his wing and swept them almost violently together. He doesn't know how any of us are going to behave. He has taken for granted, with his naive and heart-rending trust in the beauty of human nature, that we are all going to behave beautifully. He is absorbed in his scheme. Each one of us fits into it at some point, and if there is anything in us left over it is not, at the moment, his concern. Yet he himself has margins about him and a mysterious hinterland not to be confined or accounted for by any scheme. He alone of us has the air, buoyant, restless, and a little vague, of being in for some tremendous but wholly visionary adventure. When I look at him I wonder again what this particular adventure is going to do to him, and whether he has, even now, any vivid sense of the things that are about to happen. I remember that evening in my scullery, and how he talked about the German siege-guns as if they were details in some unreal scene, the most interesting part, say, of a successful cinematograph show. But they are really bringing up those siege-guns from Namur.