I break it to them very gently that I've volunteered to serve at the tables at the Palais des Fetes. I feel as if I had sneaked into a remunerative job while my comrades are starving. The Commandant is not quite as pleased as I thought he would be to hear of my engagement at the Palais des Fetes. He says, "It is not your work." I insist that my work is to do anything I can do; and that if I cannot dress wounds I can at least hand round bread and pour out coffee and wash up dishes. It is true that I am Secretary and Reporter and (for the time being) Treasurer to the Ambulance, and that I carry its funds in a leather purse belt round my body. Because I am the smallest and weakest member of the Corps that is the most unlikely place for the funds to be. It was imprudent, to say the least of it, for the Chaplain in his khaki, to carry them, as he did, into the firing-line. The belt, which fitted the Chaplain, hangs about half a yard below my waist and is extremely uncomfortable, but that is neither here nor there. Keeping the Corps' accounts only takes two hours and a half, even with Belgian and English money mixed, and when I've added the same column of figures ten times up and ten times down, to make certain it's all right (I am no good at accounts, but I know my weakness and guard against it, giving the Corps the benefit of every doubt and making good every deficit out of my private purse). Writing the Day-Book--perhaps half an hour. The Commandant's correspondence, when he has any, and reporting to the British Red Cross Society, when there is anything to report, another half-hour at the outside; and there you have only three and a half hours employed out of the twenty-four, even if I balanced my accounts every day, and I don't. True that _The Daily Chronicle_ promised to take any articles that I might send them from the front, but I haven't written any. You cannot write articles for _The Daily Chronicle_ out of nothing; at least I can't. The Commandant finally yields to argument and entreaty. * * * * * I do not tell him that what I really want to do is to go out with the Field Ambulance, and get beyond the turn of that road.