I crossed in late September to Ostend as a member of the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps. With us were two women, Elsie Knocker, an English trained nurse, and Mairi Chisholm Gooden-Chisholm, a Scotch girl. There were a round dozen of us, doctors, chauffeurs, stretcher bearers. Our idea of what was to be required of women at the front was vague. We thought that we ought to know how to ride horseback, so that we could catch the first loose horse that galloped by and climb on him. What we were to do with the wounded wasn't clear, even in our own minds. We bought funny little tents and had tent practice in a vacant yard. The motor drive from Ostend to Ghent was through autumn sunshine and beauty of field flowers. It was like a dream, and the dream continued in Ghent, where we were tumbled into the Flandria Palace Hotel with a suite of rooms and bath, and two convalescing soldiers to care for us. We looked at ourselves and smiled and wondered if this was war. My first work was the commissariat for our corps. Then came the English Naval Reserves and Marines _en route_ to Antwerp. They had been herded into the cars for twelve hours. They were happy to have great hunks of hot meat, bread, and cigarettes. Just across the platform, a Belgian Red Cross train pulled in--nine hundred wounded men, bandaged heads with only the eyes showing, stumps of arms flapping a welcome. The Belgians had been shot to pieces, holding the line. And, now, here were the English come to save them. This looked more like war to us. From the Palace windows we hung out over the balcony to see the Taubes. I knew that at last we were on the fringes of war. Later, we were to be at the heart of it. It was at Melle that I learned I was on the front lines. We went up the road from Ghent to Melle in blithe ignorance, we three women. The day before, the enemy had held the corner with a machine gun. "Let's go on foot, and see where the Germans were," suggested "Scotch." We came to burned peasants' houses. Inside the wreckage, soldiers crouched with rifles ready at the peek-holes. A Reckitt's bluing factory was burning, and across the field were the Germans. The cottages without doors and windows were like toothless old women. Piles of used cartridges were strewed around. There stood a gray motor-car, a wounded German in the back seat, his hands riddled, the car shot through, with blood in the bottom from two dead Germans. I realized the power of the bullet, which had penetrated the driver, the padded seat, the sheet metal and splintered the wood of the tonneau. We saw a puff of white smoke over the field from a shrapnel. That was the first shell I had seen close. It meant nothing to me. In those early days, the hum of a shell seemed no more than the chattering of sparrows. That was the way with all my impressions of war--first a flash, a spectacle; later a realization, and experience.