Just as all the apparently endless combinations of initials in France are symbols of living realities to those who understand them, and of their ignorance to those who don't just as the very heading of "A.B.C." which I have given this chapter typifies both those combinations of initials and the fact that you and I are beginning at the very beginning--for no one could have been more blankly ignorant than I when I went over to France--so the letter "I" whenever it occurs in this book is a symbol for You. CHAPTER II THE FEVER CHART OF WAR "The women are splendid...." How tired we are of hearing that, so tired that we begin to doubt it, and the least hostile emotion that it evokes is the sense that after all the men are so much more splendid, so far beyond praise, that the less one says of anyone else the better. That sentence is dead, let us hope, fallen into the same limbo as "Business as Usual" and the rest of the early war-gags, but the prejudices it aroused, the feeling of boredom, have not all died with it. Words have at least this in common with men, that the evil that they do lives after them. Let me admit that when those in authority sent for me to go to France and see what certain sections of the women there were doing, I didn't want to go. I told them rather ungraciously that if they wanted the "sunny-haired-lassies-in-khaki-touch" they had better send somebody else. I am not, and never have been, a feminist or any other sort of an 'ist, never having been able to divide humanity into two different classes labelled "men" and "women." Also, to tell the truth, the idea of going so far behind the lines did not appeal. For this there is the excuse that in England one grows so sick of the people who talk of "going to the Front" when they mean going to some safe château as a base for a personally conducted tour, or--Conscientious objectors are the worst sinners in this latter class--when they are going to sit at canteens or paint huts a hundred miles or so behind the last line of trenches. The reaction from this sort of thing is very apt to make one say: "Oh, France? There's no more in being in France behind the lines than in working in England." A point of view in which I was utterly and completely wrong. There is a great deal of difference, not in any increased danger, but in quite other ways, as I shall show in the place and order in which it was gradually made apparent to me.