The fire was burning better behind its automobile hood. An orderly had brought in tea, white bread, butter, a pitcher of condensed cream, and an English teacake. We gathered round the tea table. War seemed a hundred miles away. Except for the blue uniforms and brass buttons of the officers who belonged to the naval air service, the orderly's khaki and the bayonet from a gun used casually at the other end of the table as a paperweight, it was an ordinary English tea. CHAPTER XXII THE WOMEN AT THE FRONT It was commencing to rain outside. The rain beat on the windows and made even the reluctant fire seem cosy. Some one had had a box of candy sent from home. It was brought out and presented with a flourish. "It is frightful, this life in the trenches!" said the young officer who passed it about. Shortly afterward the party was increased. An orderly came in and announced that an Englishwoman, whose automobile had broken down, was standing on the bridge over the canal and asked to be admitted. She did not know the password and the sentry refused to let her pass by. One of the officers went out and returned in a few moments with a small lady much wrapped in veils and extremely wet. She stood blinking in the doorway in the accustomed light. She was recognised at once as a well-known English novelist who is conducting a soup kitchen at a railroad station three miles behind the Belgian front. "A car was to have picked me up," she said, "but I have walked and walked and it has not come. And I am so cold. Is that tea? And may I come to the fire?" So they settled her comfortably, with her feet thrust out to the blaze, and gave her hot tea and plenty of bread and butter. "It is like the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland," said one of the officers gaily. "When any fresh person drops in we just move up one place." The novelist sipped her tea and told me about her soup kitchen. "It is so very hard to get things to put into the soup," she said. "Of course I have no car, and now with the new law that no women are to be allowed in military cars I hardly know what to do." "Will you tell me just what you do?" I asked. So she told me, and later I saw her soup kitchen. "Men come in from the front," she explained, "injured and without food. Often they have had nothing to eat for a long time. We make soup of whatever meat we can find and any vegetables, and as the hospital trains come in we carry it out to the men. They are so very grateful for it." That was to be an exceptional afternoon at the naval air-station. For hardly had the novelist been settled with her tea when two very attractive but strangely attired young women came into the room. They nodded to the officers, whom they knew, and went at once to the business which had brought them. "Can you lend us a car?" they asked. "Ours has gone off the road into the mud, and it looks as though it would never move again."