(3.) M. ---- was the agent of the Military Power, commissioned to test the nerve of the English Ambulance. ("Stood fire, have they? Give 'em a _real_ scare, and see how they behave.") (4.) M. ---- is a psychologist and made this little experiment on the English Ambulance himself. (5.) He is a humorist and was simply "pulling its leg." The three last theories are plausible, but all five collapse before the inscrutability of Monsieur's face. Germans or no Germans, one ambulance car started at five in the morning for Quatrecht, somewhere between Ghent and Brussels, to fetch wounded and refugees. The other went, later, to Zele. I am not very clear as to who has gone with them, but Mrs. Torrence, Mrs. Lambert, Janet McNeil and Dr. Haynes and Mr. Riley have been left behind. It is their third day of inactivity, and three months of it could not have devastated them more. They have touched the very bottom of suicidal gloom. Three months hence their state of mind will no doubt appear in all its absurdity, but at the moment it is too piteous for words. When you think what they were yesterday and the day before, there is no language to express the crescendo of their despair. I came upon Mr. Riley this morning, standing by the window of the mess-room, and contemplating the facade of the railway station. (It is making a pattern on our brains.) I tried to soothe him. I said it was hard lines--beastly hard lines--and told him to cheer up--there'd be heaps for him to do presently. And he turned from me like a man who has just buried his first-born. Janet McNeil is even more heart-rending, sunk in a chair with her hands stuck into the immense pockets of her overcoat, her flawless and impassive face tilted forward as her head droops forlornly to her breast. She is such a child that she can see nothing beyond to-day, and yesterday and the day before that. She is going back to-morrow. Her valour and energy are frustrated and she is wounded in her honour. She is conscious of the rottenness of putting on a khaki tunic, and winding khaki putties round and round her legs to hang about the Hospital doing nothing. And she had to sell her motor bicycle in order to come out. Not that that matters in the least. What matters is that we are here, eating Belgian food and quartered in a Belgian Military Hospital, and "swanking" about with Belgian Red Cross brassards (stamped) on our sleeves, and doing nothing for the Belgians, doing nothing for anybody. We are not justifying our existence. We are frauds. I tell the poor child that she cannot possibly feel as big a fraud as I do; that there was no earthly reason why I should have come, and none whatever why I should remain. And then, to my amazement, I learn that I am envied. It's all right for me. My job is clearly defined, and nobody can take it from me. I haven't got to wind khaki putties round my legs for nothing.