At this point I break down. I hear myself say "Damn" five times, softly but distinctly. (This after reproving Tom for unfettered speech and potential insubordination.) Tom stops at a hat-shop. The Commandant to his doom enters, and presently returns wearing a soft felt hat of a vivid green. He asks me what I think of it. I tell him all I think of it, and he says that if I feel like that about it he'll go in again and get another one. I forget what I said then except that I wanted to get on to Melle. That Melle was the place of all places where I most wished to be. Then, lest he might feel unhappy in his green hat, I said that if he would leave it out all night in the rain and then sit on it no doubt time and weather and God would do something for it. This time we were off, and when I realized it I said "Hurray!"[23] Tom had not said anything for some considerable time. We found the British lines in a little village just outside of Ghent. No place there for a base hospital. We hung about here for twenty minutes, and the women and children came out to stare at us with innocent, pathetic faces. Somebody had stowed away one of the trophies--the spiked German helmet--in the ambulance car, and the chauffeur Tom stuck it on a stick and held it up before the British lines. It was greeted with cheers and a great shout of laughter from the troops; and the villagers came running out of their houses to look; they uttered little sharp and guttural cries of satisfaction. The whole thing was a bit savage and barbaric and horribly impressive. Finally we left the British lines and set out towards Melle by a cross-road. We got through all right. A thousand accidents may delay his going, but once off, no barriers exist for the Commandant. Seated in the front of the car, utterly unperturbed by the chauffeur Tom's sarcastic comments on men, things and women, wrapped (apparently) in a beautiful dream, he looks straight ahead with eyes whose vagueness veils a deadly simplicity of purpose. I marvel at the transfiguration of the Commandant. Before the War he was a fairly complex personality. Now he has ceased to exist as a separate individual. He is merged, vaguely and vastly, in his adventure. He is the Motor Ambulance Field Corps; he is the ambulance car; he is the electric spark and the continuous explosion that drives the thing along. It is useless to talk to him about anything that happened before the War or about anything that exists outside it. He would not admit that anything did exist outside it. He is capable of forgetting the day of the week and the precise number of female units in his company and the amount standing to his credit at his banker's, but, once off, he is cock-sure of the shortest cut to the firing-line within a radius of fifty kilometres.