...  You ask me what I really think of Queenie at close quarters.  Well, the quarters are very close and I know she simply hates me.  She was fearfully sick when she found we were both in the same Corps.  She’s always trying to get up a row about something.  She’d like to have me fired out of Belgium if she could, but I mean to stay as long as I can, so I won’t quarrel with her.  She can’t do it all by herself.  And when I feel like going back on her I tell myself how magnificent she is, so plucky and so clever at her job.  I don’t wonder that half the men in our Corps are gone on her.  And there’s a Belgian Colonel, the one Cutler gets his orders from, who’d make a frantic fool of himself if she’d let him.  But good old Queenie sticks to her job and behaves as if they weren’t there.  That makes them madder.  You’d have thought they’d never have had the time to be such asses in, but it’s wonderful what a state you can get into in your few odd moments.  Dicky says it’s the War whips you up and makes it all the easier.  I don’t know....

    FURNES.

    November.

That’s where we are now.  I simply can’t describe the retreat.  It was too awful, and I don’t want to think about it.  We’ve “settled” down in a house we’ve commandeered and I suppose we shall stick here till we’re shelled out of it.

Talking of shelling, Queenie is funny.  She’s quite annoyed if anybody besides herself gets anywhere near a shell.  We picked up two more stretcher-bearers in Ostend and a queer little middle-aged lady out for a job at the front.  Cutler took her on as a sort of secretary.  At first Queenie was so frantic that she wouldn’t speak to her, and swore she’d make the Corps too hot to hold her.  But when she found that the little lady wasn’t for the danger zone and only proposed to cook and keep our accounts for us, she calmed down and was quite decent.  Then the other day Miss Mullins came and told us that a bit of shell had chipped off the corner of her kitchen.  The poor old thing was ever so proud and pleased about it, and Queenie snubbed her frightfully, and said she wasn’t in any danger at all, and asked her how she’d enjoy it if she was out all day under fire, like us.

And she was furious with me because I had the luck to get into the bombardment at Dixmude and she hadn’t.  She talked as if I’d done her out of her shelling on purpose, whereas it only meant that I happened to be on the spot when the ambulances were sent out and she was away somewhere with her own car.  She really is rather vulgar about shells.  Dicky says it’s a form of war snobbishness (he hasn’t got a scrap of it), but I think it really is because all the time she’s afraid of one of us being killed.  It must be that.  Even Dicky owns that she’s splendid, though he doesn’t like her....

iv

Five months later.

    The Manor, Wyck-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire.