And as both the Fannies and the Waacs go in khaki, and both the V.A.D.'s and the G.S.V.A.D.'s in dark blue, it will be seen that confusion is very easy to the uninitiate. That is my only excuse for perpetrating the worst blunder that has probably ever been committed in France. Taken to tea at a Fanny convoy I committed the unspeakable sin of asking whether they were Waacs.... They were very kind to me about it, but when I eventually grasped the system, I saw it was as though I had asked a Brass Hat whether he belonged to the Salvation Army. Yet when I told the sad tale of my _gaffe_ to the members of a V.A.D. convoy, they only seemed to think it must have been quite good for the Fannies ... but somehow it wasn't equally good for them when I timidly asked whether they were G.S.V.A.D.'s ... though they were also very kind to me about it. The D. of T. motored me over to the Fannies' convoy, on a pale day of difficult sunlight. Is there anywhere in the world, I wondered, more depressing--more morbid--landscape, than that round Calais? It weighs on the soul as a fog upon the senses, and it seemed to me that only people of such a tenacious gaiety as the French or such an independence from environment as the British could survive there for long. I have seen country far flatter that was yet more wholesome, and I loathe flat country. There is something in the perpetual repetition of form in the country round Calais, the endless sameness of its differences, that is peculiarly oppressive. Pearly skies blotted with paler clouds, endless rows of bare poplars, like the skeletons of dead flames, yellowish roads unwinding for ever, acres of unbroken and sickly green, of new-turned earth of an equally sad brown ... and over all the trail of war, whose footprint is desolation. The occupation even of an army of defence means camp after camp; tin huts, wooden huts, zinc roofs; hospitals; barbed wire; mud. And, amidst all this, and the sudden reminders of more active warfare in houses crumpled to a scatter of rubble by a bomb, there are people working, year in, year out, undismayed by the sordid litter of it.... The saving of it all to the newcomer, though even that must pall on anyone too accustomed, is that, like Pater's Monna Lisa, upon this part of France "the ends of the world are come" ... (and who shall wonder if in consequence "her eyelids are a little weary"?). Inscrutable Chinamen, silent as shadows, flashing their sudden smiles, even more mysterious than their immobility, turned from their labour to watch the passing of the car; Kaffirs from South Africa, each with a white man's vote, voluntarily enlisted for the Empire, swung along; vividly dark Portuguese, clad in grey, came down to their rest camps; Belgians trotted past with their little tassels bobbing from their jaunty caps. And, in great droves along the roads, or, sometimes, more solitary in the fields, the German prisoners stood at gaze, their English escort shepherding.