When the war broke, everyone wanted to go and see what it was like, and it is merely useless to observe that this was treating it as a huge picnic. Before the tightening-up process began, in the wonderful days when the war was still fluid, it was possible to get out to the front--the real front--on all sorts of excuses. The tightening-up was necessary, and all too slow, but let us not, because of that, fall into the error of calling the instinct which urged non-combatants "mere" curiosity, as though that were not the greatest of the gifts of the gods, without which nothing is done. Among these non-combatants who wanted to see the war were many women, and if, mixed with their patriotism and desire to help, went a streak of that love of danger which is no disgrace to a man--why, I maintain that it is no disgrace to a woman either, but as natural an instinct as that which drives one to a wayside orchard if one is hungry. There is nothing sooner slaked, for the time being, than this inherent love of danger. Men who wanted the fun of it at the beginning of the war are heartily sick of it now, though they wouldn't be out of it for worlds. But most of the women haven't been allowed enough danger to get sick of it, and so, in patches of young women you meet working in France, the old craving still lifts its head. I came across a delightful streak of it at T----, the oldest big convoy in France. The garage, over which the girls live, for their camp is still a-building, is set in the eye of the cold winter winds on the top of a hill overlooking the sea. It was snowing heavily as I drove up, great fat flakes of snow that wove and interwove in the air in the way that only snowflakes can, so that sometimes they look as though they were falling upwards. The long line of the wooden garage showed dark in the background, in the space before it the ambulances stood about, but the girls were fox-trotting in couples all about them, their big rubber boots shuffling up little clouds of snow; on the head of one girl was swathed a greenish-blue handkerchief, which made a lovely note of colour against the swirling whiteness. I was taken in through the garage, where two drivers were painting their cars--for all painting is done by the girls, sometimes with unexpected effects, as on one car which I saw, where "Eve" from the _Tatler_ and her little dog were depicted in front of the body--and up a flight of wooden stairs with an out-of-doors landing on top, to the cubicles, which opened off on either side of the open-ended passage for the whole length of the building. Here, in one of the little bedrooms for two, we had a meal of cocoa and cake, known as the "elevener," for the obvious reason that it is consumed at eleven every morning. It was all quite different from my evening at the convoy at E----, but equally stimulating.